advanced superpowers

Set up Knife on your local machine, and a Chef Server in the cloud

If you already have a working chef installation you can skip this section.

To get started with knife and chef, follow the "Chef Quickstart,":http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Quick+Start We use the hosted chef service and are very happy, but there are instructions on the wiki to set up a chef server too. Stop when you get to "Bootstrap the Ubuntu system" -- cluster chef is going to make that much easier.

• Launch Cloud Instances with Knife
• EC2 Bootstrap Fast Start Guide

Auto-vivifying machines (no bootstrap required!)

On EC2, you can make a machine that auto-vivifies -- no bootstrap necessary. Burn an AMI that has the config/client.rb file in /etc/chef/client.rb. It will use the ec2 userdata (passed in by knife) to realize its purpose in life, its identity, and the chef server to connect to; everything happens automagically from there. No parallel ssh required!

EBS Volumes

Define a snapshot_id for your volumes, and set create_at_launch true.