We’ve been using cluster_chef at Runa as the basis of our chef management for our entire production environment for the last few months. I’m very excited about what Flip and his team have done to turn Ironfan into a pretty nice way to orchestrate the Chef deployment of complex clusters of servers with a focus on supporting the Hadoop Ecosystem and EC2. Its not specific to Hadoop or EC2, but has a lot for supporting those which is what we really liked.

Here’s the blurb:

How to Build a Hadoop Cluster from Scratch in 20 Minutes

In this tutorial, Flip Kromer, CTO of Infochimps will introduce Ironfan (formerly Cluster Chef), Infochimps’ open-source tool for orchestrated systems provisioning.  It builds on Chef, Opscode‘s beloved open-source tool for provisioning cloud machines and adds a number of superpowers that allow you to provision and deploy coordinated clusters of machines all at once.  Stop monkeying around, spending days or weeks spinning up clusters, and manually copying and pasting IP addresses to glue all the pieces together.  Just spin them up when you need them and kill them when you don’t; let Ironfan handle the details.  Now, you can spend your money, time and engineering focus on more important things – like finding insights in your data.

The Ironfan demo will run approximately 30 minutes and we welcome all attendees to bring short demos (3-5 minutes) of awesome things they have done with Chef or Ironfan (formerly Cluster Chef).  Flip will also be available for Q&A at the end of this session or later in the evening over beers.

You should sign up in advance for the BigDataCamp at http://bigdatacamp-santaclara-2012-eivtefrnd.eventbrite.com/ Its free but they like to know how many are coming.

The post Upcoming Mini-tutorial at BigDataCamp: How to Build a Hadoop Cluster from Scratch in 20 Minutes by CTO of Infochimps first appeared on Cognizant Transmutation.