[chef] Re: ordering the roles directory into subdirectories

[Andrew Shafer < >]

A word of advice, implementing configuration management is a really good time to revisit all the legacy decisions that created complexity in your environment. Don't waste the opportunity just redescribing what exists, revisit the why it exists and move to simplify and standardize.

On Fri, Oct 29, 2010 at 3:09 PM, Christian Requena < "> > wrote:

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