Doing everything in chef cookbooks and definitions is easy and powerful. But I'll show you when it's time to set aside them and bring out the heavyweight guns: full fledged resources. I'll show you how we've taken our (surprisingly complicated) application deployment and database management definitions and converted them to heavyweight resources. Some things that are better: input validation, error handling, debugging information, testing, readability (really!) and ease of future improvements. Most importantly, I'll show that sometimes heavyweight resources are easier than LWRPs.