[chef] on the general usage of chef

[Sam Darwin < >]

it seems like the ideal case of using chef, would be to run it as a cronjob
every day on the servers, to keep the servers in their proper and perfect
configuration.

In practice, we are currently not doing this.   there is more than just one
simple reason for it.

- the recipes would need to always be in a perfect and functional state.   
let's say that you were experimenting with something.   and then every single
server in your environment grabs that recipe and runs it.    this could affect
the entire system, every single server.    

- even if you had two separate chef servers, one for production and one for
testing...  so that the production server was designed to always be correct. 
even then, there is some small chance for human error, and it would propagate
automatically and without necessarily being watched at that moment, to every
single server in the environment.

-  you might have recipes that are designed to handle 95% of the tasks, but
there is still a bit of human intervention, or the developers are still 
logging
into the servers and tweaking things .      an automated chef run might cause 
a
conflict between the recipe and the manually added changes.

- the recipes are in a state of flux, you might apply them carefully and
methodically to only a few servers at a time.

thoughts on this topic?