With incredible power/flexibility...comes great complexity

[dhartford]

This projects looks perfect for what I'm looking for, however, are there some more 'general' usecases that can help break down what problems AFW can solve?

(Blog, wiki, etc versus github directly possibly).

For example, nginix server fronting a tomcat app that talks to a mysql database (3 different servers, 3 different chef recipes/templates) sounds like what AFW handles the network connecting piece between each (nginix:80 -> public facing, nginix* -> tomcat:8080, tomcat:* -> mysql:3306)

If this seems correct, maybe just a link to wiki or blog that helps provide some hands-on examples (don't get me wrong, the examples in the readme are great, but assume some expectations that you already know what you are doing :-).

[jvehent]

I'm not sure what you are asking beyond some more examples... I'm happy to update the doc where needed, but without knowing what you don't yet understand, it's sort of hard :)

Below are a few examples from an old config, that gives you an idea of how to use Chef searches to open inbound and outbound rules:

  :afw => {
    :rules => {
      'Graphite Server Web Interface' => {
        :protocol => 'tcp',
        :direction => 'in',
        :user => 'www-data',
        :source => '0.0.0.0/0',
        :dport => '80'
      },
      'Graphite Line Entry Points' => {
          :protocol => 'tcp',
          :direction => 'in',
          :user => 'www-data',
          :source => ['roles:chef-client',
                      '172.17.0.0/24'],
          :dport => '2003'
      },
      'Graphite Pickle Inbound Replication' => {
          :protocol => 'tcp',
          :direction => 'in',
          :user => 'www-data',
          :source => 'roles:graphite-server OR recipes:graphite*',
          :dport => '2014'
      },
      'Graphite Pickle Outbound Replication' => {
          :protocol => 'tcp',
          :direction => 'out',
          :user => 'www-data',
          :destination => 'roles:graphite-server',
          :dport => '2014'
      },
      'Graphite Metrics access from LAN' => {
        :direction => 'in',
        :protocol => 'tcp',
        :user => 'www-data',
        :source => '10.0.0.0/8',
        :dport => '2003',
      }
    }

[dhartford]

I think an example project that helps demonstrate the chef-search may be what I don't understand --

I'm using chef-solo with packer.io, so may be a disconnect when compared to using chef-server. So in packer.io land, I want a chef recipe that adds a tomcat server, then if there are any available nginix servers to open up port 8080 for tomcat to those nginix servers (which I think is what AFW solves).

A chef-server that has the whole infrastructure for you to do a chef-search may be the missing piece.