[chef] Re: Re: Re: Role data in cookbooks.

[Lamont Granquist < >]

On 3/15/14 3:06 AM, Christopher Armstrong wrote:
> Any reason you're not using environments for location-specific attributes?
Hosts can only be in one environment.  You can wind up with the cross 
product of all your locations with all your prod/int/test/dev 
application environments if you go down that road (us-west-1-prod, 
us-east-1-test, etc).  If you've got a large company with multiple 
business units you might also want to mixin per-business-unit accounts 
as another dimension and this gets unwieldy to do as environments where 
you have to enumerate every cell and adding a new dimension is 
difficult.  Its easier to have 'role[us-west-1],role[ecomm]' with 
environment = 'production'.

OTOH, if you're using pinned environments to do deployments you may want 
exceedingly fine grained environments, that are the cross product of 
(application-role)x(app-environment)x(datacenter)x(deployment-cell). 
You're going to need to carefully plan your automation around managing 
that right now since that will create a ton of environments and if 
you're doing that by hand it'll create a mess.