Opscode Unleashes New Generation of Chef™

SEATTLE, Feb. 4, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode^®, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced the release of a new generation of Opscode Chef™. Opscode Chef 11, which was re-written from the ground up and leverages best-of-breed infrastructure technologies including the Erlang programming language and PostgreSQL database, delivers a rock-solid automation platform that can easily scale up to 10,000 nodes from a single Chef server. In conjunction with the release of Chef 11, Opscode now offers two tiers of commercial support, covering both live system support and cookbook code troubleshooting. Opscode also today announced the next generation of Private Chef™ for the enterprise, delivering key features including a new management console, activity reporting, push client runs, role-based access control, and multi-tenancy (see separate press release).

"In just four years, Chef has become the open source standard for infrastructure automation, with tens of thousands of users and thousands of contributors using Chef around the globe," said Adam Jacob, creator of Chef and Opscode Chief Customer Officer. "This new generation of Chef provides greater scale, functionality, performance, and support for both open source users and enterprise organizations. In other words, this stuff rocks, so bring us your hardest infrastructure challenges and let's get to work."

Chef 11 uses the Erlang programming language for its API server, providing open source users with a highly scalable, available and resilient framework that reduces memory usage 10X over the previous, Ruby-based versions of Chef. By combining the Erlang API Server with the new PostgreSQL Chef database, Opscode is delivering 4X greater scale for open source users, with the new Chef server capable of supporting up to 10,000 clients on a single server, while only using a fraction of the CPU previous Chef generations required. In addition to the Erlang API server and PostgreSQL database, the next generation of Chef also includes these new features:

• Comprehensive Testing: Chef 11 features the Pedant Testing Suite, delivering robust testing capabilities that can be executed with a single command, automating more than 2,000 end-to-end tests that ensure the Chef server is installed and working properly
• Easy Installation: Chef 11 comes packaged with a 'one-click' installer, enabling easy and rapid deployment of Chef regardless of IT environment.
• Enhanced Windows Support: With the Pedant Testing Suite, Chef 11 includes automated testing across seven different versions of Windows, improving functionality and integration within Windows environments.

"Opscode operates the largest installation of Chef on the planet. We experienced our own scale challenges and solved for scale by re-writing Chef from the ground up in Erlang," said Christopher Brown, CTO, Opscode. "We've taken the knowledge gained from working with Chef ourselves, as well as feedback from thousands of Chef users worldwide, and put it all into Chef 11. It's the best open source, infrastructure automation platform available, bar none."

Opscode Chef 11 is immediately available for free download here.

Cycle Computing Runs Big 10 Pharma Cancer Drug Research With Chef 11
A Big 10 Pharma company recently used Cycle Computing's utility supercomputing software and Chef 11 from Opscode to identify potential leads against a cancer target. The run, which utilized 10,343 servers in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud all managed by a single Chef 11 server, would have required a $44 million, 12,000 square ft data center if completed in-house. Each hour of compute time cost approximately $549.72 and 39 compute years were completed in 11 hours.

"Chef 11 is a powerful automation platform that allows us to create unprecedented utility supercomputers from 50 to 50,000 cores. We're grateful to Opscode for providing the resources necessary to research molecules that may lead to better candidates for cancer drugs," said Jason Stowe, CEO, Cycle Computing. "A single prior run with Cycle software, using an earlier version of Chef to configure the utility supercomputer, has led to three candidate compounds that have gone into the wet lab as potential cancer drug leads. As we start seeing amazing results like this, companies are increasingly using this technology as a standard research tool for molecular modeling. We're excited to be doing work with Big Pharma, Opscode, and AWS that transforms drug discovery and helps accelerate the path to real treatments."

Commercial Support for Chef 11
For the first time, Opscode now offers enterprise-class commercial support to open source users of Chef 11. Leveraging the deep expertise of Opscode's world-class services team, Opscode provides live system support and cookbook code troubleshooting, conveniently priced as Standard and Premium packages to meet the unique needs of open source Chef users. More information on commercial support for Chef 11 can be found here.

Opscode Chef is an open-source systems integration framework available for download and easy installation in physical, virtual or cloud infrastructures. Chef delivers a flexible model for reuse, enabling users to easily and consistently configure and deploy infrastructure as code across any operating system from Windows to Unix and Linux. Chef simplifies systems management and reduces operating risk through easy, reusable 'recipes' and 'cookbooks' of code-based configuration and deployment commands for resources, services and applications.

Getting Started with Chef
Chef 11 can be downloaded for free here. Full documentation for installing, running and using Chef 11 can be found here. For more information on commercial support options for Chef 11, please go 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.

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

SOURCE Opscode