Historically, change in IT did not happen very often and Chef inherits a lot of the old CFEngine model where you want to run it periodically and gain the 'self-healing'/'computer immunity' features so that servers are always being fixed back into compliance. In places that I've worked in the past, change management was pretty abusive, so if CFEngine wasn't running at least nightly then it'd never run for months (or sometimes years -- I can think of a few servers at a company that I worked at for 3 years which were never deployed to). If you had the model where you only kicked it off when a 'Change' happened then it became terrifying to think about what might occur when you ran it because it hadn't been run in so long.
So, my point is something my colleague brought up recently - why run chef-client as a daemon on production runway at all? Why not run it on demand, such as when changes need to go out to production? From my experience anyway, our production runways never get any updates when they are actually serving production traffic, so it's safe to turn chef-client off to prevent any accidental promotion of cookbooks, environments, or roles to production.
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