Opscode Releases New Enterprise Features for Chef as Adoption Surges

SEATTLE, May 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- From #ChefConf 2012, Opscode®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced the release of a number of new enterprise capabilities for Open Source Chef™, Hosted Chef™ and Private Chef™, delivering greater scale from a single Chef server, a 'one-click' installer, 'Dry-Run', integration with Active Directory and native support for Solaris. Opscode also today announced that it is releasing a free trial version of Private Chef with 60 days of free support from Opscode. 

"The rapid adoption of Chef underscores a major transition to scale-out computing in the enterprise," said Mitch Hill, CEO, Opscode.  "This shift is creating a major skills gap in IT, with access to compute resources far outpacing the number of professionals capable of managing these complex environments. Opscode Chef is a force multiplier that solves for this skill gap, providing a model for re-use which enables businesses to automate IT infrastructure and maximize the potential of cloud computing."

Chef Adoption Surging

The release of new enterprise capabilities comes during a period of rapid adoption of Opscode's cloud infrastructure automation solutions. The company today reported that Open Source Chef has reached 1,000,000 downloads worldwide, with adoption approaching 100,000 downloads per month. Further, the Chef community now includes 26,000 active users, 13,000 registered users, 600 individual contributors, 120 corporate contributors and more than 450 cookbooks. Opscode also recently announced that its commercial customer base has surged into the hundreds, with customers ranging from small and medium sized business to Fortune 500 companies in Financial Services, Retail, Media and Entertainment, Hi-Tech and Internet Services. 

Chef's New Enterprise Capabilities

Driven by Opscode's deep expertise in running the world's largest infrastructures and leveraging contributions from more than 120 companies and 600 individuals within the vibrant Chef community, Chef's enriched functionality includes a number of key enterprise features designed to maximize the value of IT resources and minimize costs:

• Industry-Leading Scale: Private Chef now leverages the scalability and fault-tolerance of the Erlang programming language, and proven relational database management system principles. Private Chef's 3X increase in scalability over previous Chef versions provides unmatched efficiency in systems integration and management, enabling enterprise businesses to create multi-tenancy across environments and automate much larger infrastructures with the same hardware footprint.
• Faster Time-to-Value: The release of Chef's new 'one-click' installer enables easy and rapid deployment of Chef regardless of IT environment. Opscode today also announced publicly available plugins to the knife command-line tool for a broad spectrum of public cloud platforms (see separate release), providing simple, one-command deployment of cloud infrastructure automation for Amazon EC2, HP Cloud Services, Rackspace, OpenStack and many more. Additionally, with 450 currently available cookbooks providing immediately executable code for automating a wide range of operations, users can quickly and easily leverage Chef to reduce the time spent managing infrastructure and accelerate time-to-value.
• Visibility and Control: The new versions of Opscode's open source and commercial Chef solutions feature 'Dry-Run' mode, enabling development and operations teams to model changes to any resource or environment before the changes are made. With this enhanced functionality, Chef now provides users with significantly increased visibility and control, ensuring changes don't negatively impact their infrastructure.
• Seamless Windows Integration: Enterprises can now leverage their existing Active Directory user identities to manage access control in Chef, eliminating the need for separate log-ins and improving security throughout the change management process. In addition, Chef now supports rich native Windows file access controls, enabling enterprises to securely manipulate files in Windows environments.
• Native Support for Solaris: Chef now features native support for Solaris, one of the most common legacy Unix implementations, in addition to popular Linux and Windows platforms, enabling businesses to easily deploy Chef across all mainstream enterprise compute infrastructures.

Free Trial of Private Chef

Opscode today announced the release a free trial of Private Chef with a free 60 days of Opscode support.  Users can access this free trial here. Private Chef provides all the benefits of Open Source Chef and delivers them as a highly available, fully managed and supported automation software solution installed behind a user's firewall. Private Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout your entire infrastructure, reducing management costs and risk within enterprise compute environments.

About #ChefConf

#ChefConf features three days of technical sessions, workshops, training and keynotes designed to help businesses maximize the value of their IT investment and accelerate the speed of business. From in-depth discussions on the latest trends in IT infrastructure management, DevOps and cloud configuration, to engaging panel discussions on real-world use cases, #ChefConf is shaping the future of infrastructure automation.

About Opscode Chef

Opscode's pioneering software, Chef, is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout an entire infrastructure. Through a combination of configuration management and service-oriented architectures, Chef, Hosted Chef and Private Chef make it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure while simplifying systems management.

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.

Press Contact:
Lucas Welch
[email protected]
206-745-0000

SOURCE Opscode