[outworlder]

> Is it hard to dig yourself out though?

It can be, depending on how complex your environment is and the availability of people that understand it. Chef doesn't make this easy by storing so much "state" (nodes, environment, databags, etc).

But at the end of the day, these are just scripts. You can reverse-engineer the environment and replicate in Ansible or what have you.

One red flag is, if this process is found to be too difficult(as opposed to just time-consuming), then you have a very incomplete understanding of your system. That's dangerous.