[chef] Recipes doing status checkins?

[Brad Knowles < >]

Folks,

I'm curious to know what the current best practice is with regards to keeping 
your central chef server updated with current run state information as you go 
through a lengthy process?  Do you have each recipe doing a node.set on an 
attribute and then a node.save?  If so, how "heavy" is a node.save operation?

I know that we need to avoid writing to data bags, because they don't support 
multiple simultaneous writers.  However, other than using attributes and 
doing a node.save, I can't think of any obvious way to have my recipes 
storing centrally available information on their current runtime status.


I wouldn't do this kind of thing for most normal recipes that are run on a 
daily basis, but for lengthy install processes that should be done fairly 
rarely, it would be nice to be able to have some sort of ongoing progress 
information that could be fed back in near-realtime.

Thanks!

--
Brad Knowles 
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