Chef: Powerful Infrastructure Automation

Chapter 3. Leveraging Roles, Environments, and Policies

In this chapter, the reader will learn the power of using roles and to follow the best practices to manage large-scale environments by leveraging roles, environments, organizations, and policies.

"My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people." – Orson Welles

Here is a list of the topics covered in this chapter:

• Using Chef roles
• Using Chef environments
• Using Chef organizations
• Understanding nested roles
• Learning precedence hierarchy
• Exploring policies

Using Chef roles

Roles provide a way of looking at our infrastructure code as a representation of the functions performed by the servers we associate with them. Said another way, a "web server" ...