The benefit here is mostly just with larger infrastructures where you're gonna run out of wood names and where agreeing on and enforcing naming standards is a f

The benefit here is mostly just with larger infrastructures where you're gonna run out of wood names and where agreeing on and enforcing naming standards is a futile and painful process. With logical mappings, you just use chef/puppet/cmdb to do something like sshnode prod app 1 to connect to the first production app node or sshnode prod app to connect to all the production app nodes. CNAMES can do this too but then you run into potential DNS consistency issues. With this you get the human friendly abstraction and keep the machine friendly determinism. Of course when your chef server goes down this can be a PITA (I recommend building in some knife search caching!)