Chef brings the power of DevOps to web-scale IT automation

DevOps automation tool leader Chef Software, Inc. has announced today a strong business trend towards DevOps tools amid the rise of web-scale ITan architectural approach pioneered by web innovators such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Chef Software is also releasing a series of new enterprise product features and commercial services designed to help enterprise customers accelerate time to market and power speed, scale, and consistency.

Web-scale computing places a great deal of emphasis on cloud and virtualization over physical hardware. The term web-scale IT was coined by Gartner who released a report that indicated the architectural approach will be found in 50% of global enterprise by 2017, up from 10% in 2013.

DevOps and web-scale IT is really about a change in practices as to rapid deployment and much larger scale, which depends heavily on automation, says Colin Campbell, Director of Patterns and Practices at Chef.

The business of DevOps has been good for Chef with the company seeing 182% year-over-year growth in Q2. Chefs platform has also reached over one million lifetime downloads and launched a new Chef Community siteSupermarket. Developers and DevOps teams alike will want to visit that.

Hoping to hold this upward trend, Chef is looking to capture the web-scale IT wave and that means more support for enterprise functionality.

Chef Software now provides three different tiers of customer engagement for all products, now including enterprise level support.

The first is reactive support: Do you have a problem? Call us. The second is proactive support: Included as a subscription, an account manager at Chef Software and a team of engineers proactively keep track of projects and make sure best practices are being followed. Finally, Chef Software still provides consulting services for customers who need on-site hands-on support for setting up Chef.

Chef Software has announced the general availability of a new analytics platform. The platform incorporates tools added to Chef through a recent acquisition big data and analytics startup of Tower3, which has provided significant resources to Chefs analytics applications.

Chef subscribers will access this through the new Chef action log, which publishes notifications on who is changing what on the Chef server and allows administrators to track cookbook usage, roles, environments, and changes to infrastructure, all through an easy-to-use dashboard.

With this system, an IT team could run across a fault or failure, easily track back through what changes happened before that failure, and use that knowledge from the Chef stack to determine the origin of the fault.

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Chef brings the power of DevOps to web-scale IT automation