[chef] best practices

[Florian Hehlen < >]

Hi all,

 

I am looking for some tips on chef best practices and having a hard time finding anything other than highly focused docs and  tutorials on the web. Here are some of the issues I am struggling with:

·         What granularity is best for recipes?  When does it make sense to use some of the more complex ideas like depends, replaces, recommends/suggest, etc

·         How to handle uninstallation? As different cookbooks, or as a different recipe, or as something that will be done under the covers by a replacement recipe…

·         How to structure roles in a generic and useful way for workstations and servers.

·         I find that there is a certain amount of overlap in definition between node, client, and user. In fact bootstrapping creates a node and a client for each machine. Is there a good way to think about how these 3 relate to each other.

·         How to best manage recipe versioning using versions, environments, version constraints, etc. I am specifically wondering about being able to upload recipes that are being developed and tested without the fear that they will end up in production. I would like to stay away from having to manage 2 instances of chef.

 

I realise that this is a whole lot of stuff in one email… this is a list of questions that has been growing in the last few weeks as I explore and plan for chef in our environment.

 

Cheers,

Flo

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