[chef] Using chef for our own applications/services' configuration?

[Denis Haskin < >]

(apologies if this has been previously asked & answered; the mailing list archives are sort of hard to use.)

We're investigating using chef, among other purposes to better manage cross-system "application" configuration.  Specifically, we have services from multiple projects running on multiple servers, and at the moment each project has their own configuration file, despite the fact that there is configuration that would be best shared among them.

I'm quite sure this could be helped by chef but I'm having a little trouble completely wrapping my head around how we would do this with chef.  Seems like all of the chef docs & tutorials are focused on provisioning and configuring services like apache, mysql, etc.  (And, as I've read elsewhere, a lot of the chef doc seems somewhat abstract and doesn't always relate these abstract concepts to concrete usage.)

Does anybody have any samples/suggestions/etc?

Thanks!

dwh