Our teams do not use sudo primarily to gain root privileges. We use `sudo sh` to switch contexts to a non-root user with different privileges. This allows us

Our teams do not use sudo primarily to gain root privileges. We use `sudo sh` to switch contexts to a non-root user with different privileges. This allows us to modify web application code in the security context that it executes in (lower privilege). Occasionally we do need to access system level resources, and `sudo` allows us to do this in a way that forces us to acknowledge that we are doing something more dangerous. However, we prefer using automation tools such as Chef to accomplish those things in a measured, repeatable way.