Chef Contributors and Early Adopters
Opscode is fortunate to have many leading open source and web companies within the Chef community. Below are a few of the companies that have signed up to contribute to Chef, and/or use Chef in their production environments.
37signals is a dedicated team of 14 people building web applications that make it easier to collaborate, share, discuss, and get work done. Its signature application, Basecamp, has been used to manage nearly 3 million projects. The team at 37signals brought us Ruby on Rails, the infrastructure software that is used to build all the applications at 37signals and thousands of other popular sites.
Aptana provides a leading Web application development, deployment and management suite for organizations who use Web technologies including: JavaScript (Ajax), Ruby on Rails, and PHP. Aptana Studio(TM), an Eclipse-based integrated development environment for Web 2.0 sites and applications, has been downloaded over 4 million times and continues to grow at a rate of over 200,000 downloads monthly. Aptana's current cloud offering, Aptana Cloud(TM), further integrates Web application development, deployment, and management with cloud computing services to provide an efficient end-to-end solution for organizations of all sizes.
CrowdFlower provides Labor as a Service (LaaS) by letting customers access an always-on, scalable workforce. Unlike traditional methods of outsourcing and hiring which require major lead time and lots of wasteful overhead, CrowdFlower’s web offering allows businesses to instantly access thousands of workers without even picking up the phone. CrowdFlower’s statistical quality control technology finally makes cloud labor a sustainable business reality through accuracy guarantees and efficient use of workers.
Engine Yard provides automation technologies and services for Ruby on Rails, including Engine Yard Cloud, an application services platform for web developers and web teams. It provides easy-to-use, automated Rails application deployment and management, with a design philosophy that allows easy migration of existing applications. Engine Yard employs top industry experts and sponsors or contributes to many Open Source projects and efforts such as Ruby on Rails (www.rubyonrails.org), JRuby and Rubinius (www.rubini.us). Headquartered in San Francisco, Calif., Engine Yard is backed by Benchmark Capital, New Enterprise Associates, and Amazon.com.
Fotonauts is the company behind Fotopedia.com, one of the world's most innovative photo sites. Fotopedia is breathing new life into photos by building a photo encyclopedia that lets photographers and photo enthusiasts collaborate and enrich images to be useful for the whole world wide web. Fotopedia delivers over 15 million photos each month.
The Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) is one of the most famous and well-regarded engineering schools in Portugal. The IST was founded in 1911 and is home to over 8,500 undergraduate students and 1,500 post-graduate students. It is also home to one of the largest supercomputers in Portugal, a 1.6TFLOPs machine.
PoolParty is a cloud management system which makes it easy to manage powerful and complex deployments on cloud computing services such as Amazon EC2. PoolParty features built-in scaling, self-healing, monitoring, and load-balancing and support for vmware and testing clouds.
The Berkeley RAD Lab is a special program within the University of California at Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department focused on the delivery of large scale web services. The RAD Lab's goal is to systematize what has become the de facto standard process for developing, assessing, deploying, and operating large scale web services, by bringing to bear powerful techniques from statistical machine learning (SML) as well as recent insights from networking and distributed systems.
RightScale is the leader in cloud computing management. Founded in 2006, the company offers a fully automated cloud management platform that enables organizations to easily deploy and manage business critical applications across multiple clouds with complete control and portability. The RightScale Cloud Management Platform is delivered as "software as a service" (SAAS) and is available in a range of editions, from the free Developer Edition to Enterprise Editions. To date, thousands of deployments and more than 500,000 servers have been launched on the RightScale Platform for leading companies such as Animoto, Playfish, Sling Media and TC3.
Founded in 2005, Shopify (www.shopify.com) is the flagship product of Jaded Pixel Technologies. Shopify is aimed at providing businesses with easy to use e-commerce solutions, taking the challenge out of setting up and managing e-commerce storefronts. It currently hosts more than 5,000 online retailers, including Tesla Motors, Evisu Jeans and Robin Piccone.
Webtrends is an enterprise customer intelligence company that turns online and offline data into understanding. Webtrends delivers the industry's most recognized search engine marketing, visitor intelligence, and analytics solutions to enable companies to understand their customers, drive engagement, and enhance marketing and brand awareness. Thousands of global organizations, including Microsoft, Reuters, General Mills and Ticketmaster have chosen Webtrends business solutions and client services expertise to optimize their customers' online experiences.
Wikia is a community destination supporting the creation and development of wiki communities on any topic people are passionate about. Wikia supports many thousands of wiki communities in dozens of languages. Part of the free culture movement, Wikia content is released under a free content license and operates on the Open Source MediaWiki software. Wikia was founded by Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley in 2004. Wikia has received two rounds of investment; in March 2006 from Bessemer Venture Partners and in December 2006 from Amazon.com.