Meteor Entertainment™ Launches HAWKEN™ with Opscode

SEATTLE, March 6, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode^®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Meteor Entertainment deployed Opscode Hosted Chef™ to automate configuration management for the Amazon EC2 infrastructure powering its highly-anticipated, free-to-play first-person shooter game HAWKEN. Using Hosted Chef, a single Meteor system engineer delivered the entire production and staging infrastructure for the late 2012 international open beta of HAWKEN in only six hours, a feat that would have taken at least five additional engineers to accomplish without Hosted Chef.

Meteor Entertainment is a free-to-play game publisher whose most recent game, HAWKEN, developed by Adhesive Games™, was called, "a beautiful and competent shooter," by PC Gamer. Meteor runs a primarily Windows-based, Amazon EC2 cloud environment for its development and staging operations, including a sophisticated application stack for creating and delivering its game products. As the company prepared to launch HAWKEN's open beta in 20 countries simultaneously on December 12, 2012, it needed a scalable automation platform capable of delivering fully configured, highly consistent cloud infrastructure with minimal management.

"Launching HAWKEN was our biggest and most important project to date, with widespread high expectations in the gaming community, a tight timeline, and major infrastructure requirements," said Sarah Novotny, CIO, Meteor Entertainment. "Amazon solved the problem of compute capacity, while Hosted Chef made sure we got the maximum performance and value out of our cloud investment. Chef is a force multiplier that enables us to accomplish so much more than we could without it."

"If you've played HAWKEN, you know it's awesome. If you haven't played it yet, you really need to," said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. "Meteor's use of Hosted Chef to configure such a large, demanding environment in Amazon EC2 proves Chef is battle-tested for the biggest infrastructure challenges around."

Meteor Entertainment had been using Hosted Chef successfully for months to automate the configuration of its infrastructure during HAWKEN's development. Using a customized version of Opscode's Knife API plugin for Amazon EC2, Meteor was able to spin up or down hundreds of servers on any given day as it pushed toward HAWKEN's open beta, freeing engineering resources for game development and testing. Hosted Chef provided Meteor with 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' of reusable code that can be easily and repeatedly used to configure new servers in minutes and ensure maximum consistency across the company's entire infrastructure.

For detailed information on how Meteor Entertainment uses Hosted Chef and the results the company achieved, please read the case study here.

About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

About Meteor Entertainment™
Based in Seattle, Meteor Entertainment is focused on successfully publishing free-to-play games globally, with an emphasis on compelling content and setting the standard for customer service and community engagement. Meteor Entertainment's first title, HAWKEN, developed by Adhesive Games, entered Open Beta on December 12, 2012 (12.12.12). To learn more about Meteor Entertainment, visit http://www.meteor-ent.com.

Press Contact

For Opscode:
Lucas Welch
[email protected] 
206-745-0000

For Meteor Entertainment:
Shannon Gerritzen
(253) 905-3478
[email protected]

SOURCE Opscode