[chef] Organizing multiple "clients" and cookbooks

[Brian Akins < >]

Greetings,

Perhaps this has been covered before, but a quick search turned up empty.

We have many large "clients."  Each of these clients runs a multitude of apps (tomcat, apache, nginx, mysql, etc).  As we use chef more and more, we really need to decide how we are going to organize them.  How are other people doing it?  Should we have a cookbook per client and put the recipes there, including other recipes as needed (this is how we currently do it in puppet) or should we put everyone's apache stuff in the apache cookbook, etc?

I think a cookbook per client makes sense, however, I fear we may repeat ourselves allot and possibly have multiple implementations of common tasks if we are not careful.

Thoughts?

--Brian