#drupal commons

So I decided this afternoon that with a wife 39.5 weeks' pregnant I'd get into devops fun experimenting with Chef.

My goals are simple:

give me a clear, unambiguous, repeatable way of deploying servers of various types

help me deploy a bunch of PHP stuff I need right now:

WordPress with Network stuff

Drupal Commons

I toyed with the idea of getting someone to do it, but sometimes it's just easier to do it yourself (read: faster and far less complicated).

Why Chef?

The reasons are fairly simple, and all about me:

Chef's all Ruby. I know and love Ruby.

I can use Opscode's hosted platform for the servers. The last thing I want to do is run another server or bunch of servers to control my servers - I'm trying to be quick and lightweight here.

Where am I going to deploy?

I'm not entirely sure where this is going to end up. I have some unused Linodes that have to either start getting used or die. Other possibilities are Ninefold and of course AWS/EC2.