[chef] ordering the roles directory into subdirectories

[Christian Requena < >]

Hola!

I'm evaluating the introduction of Chef in an environment with about 40
different types of server, delivering about 70 different applications
which are running partly different configurations. In other words .. a
big mess ... or should I say, a big challenge? ;)

Any way, we're trying to figure out how to define roles for our
colourful environment. We came up with this:

roles/
|-- dishes/
|-- flavours/
|-- ingredients/
|-- locations/
`-- misc/

I'm trying to categorize the degrees of freedom we have concerning our
application/ operational needs.

* An "ingredient" is equivalent to a operational component (i.e.
apache2, nginx, squid...) or an application. Anything we configure or
deploy.
* A "flavour" is a special characteristic that can be
activated/deactivated on a set of servers.
* A "dish" are things you can define as a set of "ingredients" and
"flavours". This are i.e. the different types of servers we manage.
* A "location" will be a group of dishes, i.e. if you create a small
group of server to deliver a functionality for testing /developing or a
set of web-servers.
* "misc" for those thing I forgot about.

We just figured out, that chef doesn't support this approach.

So my question will be: What will you do to manage this kind of
scenario? I don't want to work on a directory with way over 100
configuration files, do you see another way to manage this?

Thanks a lot for you help