Chef Workstation: Remote Access

Question

I am currently working to setup Chef for configuration management. I have setup a Chef Workstation and have a Hosted Chef Server.

Is it possible to remotely access the workstation, eliminating the need to create multiple workstations throughout the office for those who need access to the workstation (or sharing a single physical machine configured as a workstation across the office)?

Ideally, I would like to have a single chef workstation running and configured which users can remotely access. Does anybody have any experience with this? I am not able to find any resources online as far as remote workstation access goes.

Thank you all in advance for any input!

Answer 1

Generally the workstation should be each person's actual workstation, i.e. the laptop or desktop they actually work on. If you want to make a shared workstation set up on a server that's up to you but I highly recommend not doing that. Remote access would be up to SSH or VNC or RDP or whatever else you prefer.

Answer 2

I would suggest you consider setting up a Jenkins server to act as your chef server's workstation. The advantage is that your chef configuration is shared amongst colleagues in a Git repo (as it should be), but only a single machine has the credentials to access your production chef server.

Check out the following cookbook for an example in how to setup such a server:

https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/pipeline