Chief is an Application Container for use with Amazon Web Service Auto-Scaling Groups.

An application container provides the following:

1. setup environment variables
2. start a set of processes based on a Procfile

A auto-scaling groups are great. Chief helps make them even better.

1. Install Chief — npm install -g chief
2. Export an Upstart Job — sudo chief upstart -o /etc/init/chief.conf
3. Install an Application Bundle to /home/ubuntu/bundle/master

Chief reads the environment configuration from the AWS user-data property, and passes it to your application.

Chief can run any kind of application, not just Node.js. Chief runs Procfile application; the root of your bundle must contain a Profile like the following:

web: node server.js
log: node logger.js

Chief is designed to work in production. Each process in your Procfile is started independently, and will be restarted if it crashes.

• application logs are kept at /var/log/chief/<proc-key>.log
• start using upstart — sudo start chief
• stop using upstart — sudo stop chief

• configure upstart script via command line
• support process scaling i.e. web=2,log=1
• add log aggregation