[chef] Re: Re: Should I be using roles?

[Daniel DeLeo < >]

On Monday, September 15, 2014 at 5:15 PM, AJ Christensen wrote:

> Yo,
>  
> Forgive my reply-all!
>  
> Roles are fine, use whatever you like. I use them all the time! They're 
> awesome.
>  
> If you don't use roles you'll end up half ass inventing them with
> application/library/wrapper shenanigan cookbooks, or other external
> stuff -- You could put run lists in a custom API, Consul, or etcd, for
> example.
>  
> I semi-expect Chef to offer some more guidance officially soon with
> regard to version-able policy representing the cookbooks, attributes,
> version locks and execution order.
>  
> Chef-RFC RFC019 [0] is worth looking at regarding workflows and the
> ChefDK, "the berkshelf way".
>  
> I would also urge you to read Dan's proposal regarding Arbitrary
> cookbook identifiers which is used for his (experimental? prototype?)
> Policyfile implementation. It's the way I hope we all choose to
> proceed, personally. [1]
>  
> regards,
>  
> --aj (fujin)
>  
> [0] 
> https://github.com/opscode/chef-rfc/blob/6a239ff5dc223290d4488d76fadaeeb6d14f5ab1/rfc019-chef-workflows.md
> [1] https://github.com/opscode/chef-rfc/pull/20


The policyfile stuff is coming along, but definitely not at a point where you 
can use it in production unless you’re pretty serious about being able to fix 
any bugs that are blocking you. Here’s an overview of what it is, what 
problems it solves, and how we expect it to work:  

https://github.com/opscode/chef-dk/blob/master/POLICYFILE_README.md

The pertinent part of the feature is that you’ll do the “run list expansion” 
step on your workstation while you’re developing your cookbooks, which means 
that roles will be baked in to the resulting "policy lock” document. 
Therefore any changes to roles will be rolled out gradually as you apply the 
policy to sets of nodes.

It’s still too early to say what any timeline will be for the feature to be 
useable in a real way. I just merged the first iteration of the command line 
interface to chef-dk master today 
(https://github.com/opscode/chef-dk/pull/157), but as I wrote in the 
aforementioned document, there’s a lot of critical features left to write, 
including some new server APIs (also, role support).

Whether that means you should avoid roles, or use them but be careful about 
how you update them, depends on your requirements and your team. There’s a 
lot of good perspectives in this thread to consider.

--  
Daniel DeLeo