John Keiser

Yep, should be fine. You should try it, obviously, because it's possible I'm misunderstanding what you want :)

Yep if you use add machine options it will recursive merge.

What happens if you set it to nil on those machines where you really don't want it set to anything?

There are ways, I just suspect this will look more like you want.

I'm confused. Would you mind writing an example?

Maybe this is what needs to be clearer: hashes and arrays are merged, and primitive values like strings get replaced.

If you wanted to override the iam instance profile using add machine options, and its a string, I would expect ads machine options to override.

OK! Sounds like this might do what you need then?

Yep, `name` is the actual thing used for the resource name, and since we're using that attribute for the machine name as well, there's no workaround at present. I think...

(And thus don't need the `machine_file`)