In this chapter, you learned about Chef roles and how valuable they are to deploying fully functional servers. We saw that even though they are a global resource, they can be leveraged across environments to deliver different content, based on the environment of the node. We also discussed the big shortcoming of roles, that being their lack of a version component. Then, we looked at using Chef Environments to mimic the development life cycle of your infrastructure code. That was followed by talking about how to provide multitenancy with your Chef servers using organizations. Next, we took a deep dive into the attribute precedence hierarchy, and then we finished up with a visit to the exciting new policy feature, which delivers an object that combines the best of roles and environments (and dependency tools such as Berkshelf too).

In out next chapter, we will investigate custom resources, explaining how to create and use them effectively. Are you ready? Then read on…