[chef] Chef Environments - Logical vs. Physical

[Tristan Keen < >]

  My company has a number of "Physical" environments ("clusters" ?), by which I mean a group of VMs with a copy of the major company application on for isolated use by a team/purpose - e.g. "Prod", "Staging", "Regression", "NFT", "DevTeam1", "DevTeam2".  They have some slight differences such as domains, passwords, urls, base software policy, which I want as attributes for cookbooks to consume.  Additionally, most chef searches for other nodes, e.g. to auto-find the database server, will need to be constrained to the current physical environment.

  Hence I started off using chef Environment objects & their attributes for this, but have come across advice that the one-to-one mapping between what most non-chef people think of as an "environment" and the chef concept is not such a good thing.  So I want to explore how to try using fewer "Logical" or chef environments like "Live", "Test" and "Dev", so I can flip individual VMs between them as required by the cluster/physical environment's users.  Logical environments would probably have only version constraints, and few attributes if any.

1) Anybody tried the same shift to Logical environments & care to share experiences?

2) How to represent the physical environment a node is in - e.g. a "cluster" attribute?

3) How to represent the extra attributes - a databag keyed by cluster name? A cookbook which sets attributes via code (a lot of them are very similar except for urls containing the cluster name)?

Thanks,

Tristan.