[chef] conflict between using environments to manage cookbook releases and to manage application environments

[Bryan Berry < >]

Dear Chefs,

I am flummoxed by my conflicting needs for Chef environments. I currently have 2 environments:

_default

QA:   cookbooks that I am testing,  I know exactly which nodes are in here and they can tolerate a service restart or two. No important nodes belong to this environment

PROD: Only stable, tested cookbook versions here, the vast majority of nodes belong to this environment

on the other hand, my organization has 4, count 'em, 4 application_environments 

PROD - production

QA   - user-facing tests

TS    - integration tests

DV    - development servers

All of these servers should be using stable, tested cookbooks as my devs don't want to be disrupted by a misbehaving cookbook. Thus all of them belong to PROD chef_environment, besides the couple that I am using to test cookbooks at a given moment.

I currently manage application_environments with data bags that look like this

apps/esb.json

{ 

   "pr": {

          "database_schema": "production_schema"

     },

     "qa": {

          "database_schema": "qa_schema"

     }

    . . . .

}

additionally, I add a top-level attribute to each node "app_env"  that indicates which application_environment a node belongs to

Some cookbooks, such as the haproxy cookbook, treat chef_environments like application_environments

I would love to treat chef_environments like application_environments but that would completely break my workflow. How are others dealing w/ the issues I have brought up here?