the nice way to do this is to pass the chef role to the user data template in the autoscale group vars { ROLE = "bastion" Then append this to the user_data.

the nice way to do this is to pass the chef role to the user data template in the autoscale group vars { ROLE = "bastion" Then append this to the user_data.tpl file chef-client --audit-mode enabled -R -E ${chef_environment} -r role[${ROLE}] Allows you to use the same user_data.tpl file for multiple autoscale groups