[chef] Best practices for autoscaling nodes?

[Morgan Blackthorne < >]

I was wondering what the best practice is for dealing with nodes on AWS that are set up to autoscale. Right now I have a CMS cluster that autoscales and all of the nodes identify themselves to the Chef server as the same node (since the contents of /etc/chef are identical on all of the nodes).

I'm guessing that this isn't the best practice, but I'm not sure how to set up the nodes so that they autoregister with the chef server and request a given role when doing so (I'm still getting up to speed on this install that my former cosysadmin configured). Ideally I'd like to be able to use "knife ssh" with the various client nodes down the road, and if multiple nodes are appearing as one, that's not really going to have the desired effect.

Thanks,

Morgan.