Chef is awesome. Being able to recreate your entire environment from a recipe is an inredibly powerful tool, and I had started using Chef a few months ago. When I had initially configured the Chef server I hadn’t paid much attention to the couchdb portion of it until I had a chef-server hiccup. Here are a few things to watch out for when running chef-server:

• Setup CouchDB compaction - Chef had a CouchDB size of 30+GB (after compaction it was only a few megabytes).
• When resizing instances, make sure you setup RabbitMQ to use a NODENAME. If you don’t you’ll run into an issue with RabbitMQ losing the database’s that were setup (by default, they’re based on hostname… so if you resize a EC2 instance the hostname may change, and you’ll either have to do some moving around or manually set the NODENAME to the previous hostname).
• Client’s may fail to validate after this - requiring a regeneration of the validation.pem, which is fine since this file is only used for the initial bootstrap of a server.
• Make sure you run your chef recipes you setup (for instance monitoring) on your chef-server.

I hope these tips will be helpful to other people when they run into a Chef/CouchDB/RabbitMQ issue after a server resize or hostname change. Another really helpful place is #chef on freenode’s IRC servers.