Cumulus = Linux OS for Networking w/Chef support

Posted on June 19, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

A cool new approach to networking has emerged today as our friends at Cumulus Networks emerged from stealth-mode to unveil the first Linux OS for datacenter networking.

GigaOM had this to say:

“Super-stealthy startup Cumulus Networks has launched with what could be a hot property in the burgeoning world of open networking gear. The startup, founded in 2010 by two former Cisco engineers, has built a Linux-based operating system for switches.”

While All Things D wrote:

“Combine it [Cumulus] with other SDN technologies like that of Nicira — a onetime AH [Andreessen Horowitz]-backed startup that’s now part of VMware — and you have a reasonable shot of making proprietary hardware obsolete.

Why is that important? Networks become a lot more customizable, and more carefully tuned to the applications running in them. They also get cheaper.”

Finally, here’s our own perspective:

“Managing a web-scale data center requires the agility, speed, and scalability that can only come with automation,” “By presenting a standard Linux interface, Cumulus Linux allows Opscode Chef to manage switches as if they were just another Linux node, delivering the full benefits of automation for networking.” – Jay Wampold, VP of Marketing

Read all about Cumulus’ open approach to networking here.

Stop Shaving the Yak – Mandi Walls Kicks Off Velocity 2013

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

As many of you know, Opscode has a solid presence down at Velocity 2013, and thanks to the good folks at Data Center Knowledge, we have a live report of what our first of three speakers, the awesome Mandi Walls, had to say this morning:

“All three of the morning sessions were jam-packed, with literally standing-room only crowds in each room…

In IT operations, yak shaving is the end result of customization and organizational silos, but also a legacy of problematic coding behaviors. Walls said programmers often take pride in creating processes that may be impressive, but difficult for others to replicate. Sometimes ‘it seems easier to do it yourself,’ and customize based upon tribal knowledge – critical expertise that is not widely shared.

That’s one of the challenges being addressed by DevOps, which combines many of the roles of systems administrators and developers. The movement was  popularized at large cloud builders with dynamic server environments that required regular updating – which in turn placed a premium on standards and repeatable processes, so that applications could be supported by a team without breaking every time they’re updated.

Walls emphasized the need for work to be well documented, repeatable, reliable and ‘easy to do right.’ Opscode is one of the leaders in this effort through its backing of  Chef, an open source framework using repeatable code – organized as ‘recipes’ and ‘cookbooks’ – to automate the configuration and management process for virtual servers.”

You can read DCK’s full day-one recap of Velocity here.  For the Ren & Stimpy origin of the “yak shaving” term, check this out.

Coding Your Business in the Cloud – Insights from Message Bus and PagerDuty

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

Continuing our series of #ChefTalks customer videos about the journey to becoming a coded business, this morning we published two more videos to Opscode’s YouTube Channel. Featuring a couple notable technology innovators – Message Bus and PagerDuty – the videos detail varied, unique approaches to leveraging the cloud and Opscode Chef to build more agile, more responsive, more efficient businesses. Coded Businesses.

First is Jeremy LaTrasse, CEO of Message Bus, detailing how his cloud-based message service uses Chef to manage infrastructure spread across multiple public clouds, using each provider for what it’s best at and reducing risk of failure. Jeremy commented: 

“We started focusing on automation early in our company lifecycle so we could stop doing all the menial tasks by hand. It frees us from the role of day laborer and turns us into more of a foreman or architect role.

You can view Jeremy’s full video here.

Next, Doug Barth, operations engineer at PagerDuty, discusses how the company’s entire business runs on code, with Chef playing an instrumental role in ensuring operations success. Doug noted:

“Without Chef, tasks like configuring firewalls for machines whose network topology is out of our control would be impossible.”

Please watch Doug’s video here.

You can watch all our customer videos via the #ChefTalks YouTube playlist, including previously published segments with Facebook, Nordstrom, and Riot Games, each of whom offer unique perspectives on what it means to succeed as a coded business.

For even more on transforming your own organization into a coded business, be sure to check out our webinar on Thur., June 27, with Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell, Nordstrom’s Rob Cummings, and our CTO Christopher Brown, entitled, “Building a Coded Business: Culture, Tools, and the Need for Speed.”

Awesome Chefs: BranchOut Manages 30 Million Users w/Hosted Chef + AWS

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

If you read this blog, you’ve no doubt seen us profile what our customers are achieving with Opscode Chef. However, past posts have at times glossed over some of the coolest parts of our customers’ stories.

Beginning with this entry, our hope is to begin providing more depth to our user stories with a series of Awesome Chef profiles on Community members, Chef contributors, and Opscode customers making awesomeness happen.

Of course, business benefits like increased development speed and more agile operations will still be an important part of these profiles. We sell commercial products, after all, and our customers have jobs to do and businesses to run. However, we’re also going to try and dig deeper into how our users work, the technical and business challenges they face, why they make the decisions they do, and how they achieve success in their jobs, and careers.

We hope these posts help shine a little light on all of you in the Community who give your time and talents to Chef, and we look forward to profiling the contributions, ideas, and innovations of as many of you as we can.

So, let’s get to it.

Here’s the scene: A buzzworthy startup combining the best of Facebook and LinkedIn to create a professional network that lets users share their life at work. Like many startups, using the public cloud makes a lot of sense because its cheap, easy to use, and lets them get their platform into production much faster than with a traditional data center build out. So far, so good.

Then, in a matter of months, the platform takes off and now a small Ops team is facing the content uploads and demands of 30 million users.

Whoa.

This is the challenge Jeremy Koerber and the small Ops team at BranchOut faced. To address the compute challenge, they scaled out their AWS deployment, using AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) High-CPU instances paired with AWS Simple Storage Service (S3), with data stored in MongoDB or MySQL on the computer servers, while files and objects are stored in S3. This gave them the resources to manage user-generated content spikes, which are obviously hard to predict. But even with the near limitless scale of AWS, Jeremy and his team faced two challenges:

1)     Empower developers to be self-reliant and make app updates without waiting on Ops

2)     Achieve #1 without sacrificing system consistency or resource control

Read more ›

Opscode @Velocity Next Week

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓
Headed to Velocity 2013 next week? Then join Opscode and thousands of peers, friends new and old, and really smart people in learning, socializing, and sharing best practices for moving business faster in a web-driven world. On Tuesday, June 18th, our very own Seth Vargo (“Test Driven Infrastructure with Chef”) and Mandi Walls (“Operations Level Up”) will be presenting on best practices topics that you won’t want to miss. Then, on Thursday, June 20th, Mr. ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ himself Adam Jacob will take the stage, bringing his unique combination of wit and wisdom to his talk, “How to Win Computers and Influence Reality.” Still not signed up? Register for Velocity using the code OPSCO25 and save 25% off of your registration costs. Then be sure to check in with us at booth #412 on-site.

In the News: The Phoenix Project; Current State of App Dev

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

Some more interesting ‘news’ tidbits today, including:

Happy reading.

“You just put the code in. Chef takes care of it.” – Chef + Berkshelf @Riot Games

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

For the third installment of our new #ChefTalks customer video series, we interviewed Jamie Winsor, a newly minted Awesome Chef, the author of Berkshelf, and Software Engineer at Riot Games. You all know Riot and its League of Legends game, but did you know Riot uses Private Chef to power a DevOps culture, including automating configuration and app updates in its massive infrastructure?

Please visit this link, or click the screen shot below, to watch a two-minute video of Jamie discussing how Riot uses Chef to automate a range of IT operations, his philosophy on automation, and what exactly Berkshelf, the open source cookbook management tool, is all about.

As Jamie advocates, “You just put the code in. Chef takes care of it. Prints brand new machines for you, faster than ever.”

For a deep dive into Riot’s infrastructure, use of Berkshelf and Chef, and a good look at why Jamie was honored at our inaugural Awesome Chef awards, check out Jamie’s keynote, “The Berkshelf Way,” from #ChefConf 2013 here.

Stay tuned for more videos next week of some pretty cool people talking about how they’ve turned their companies into coded businesses with Chef. And don’t forget about our webinar with Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell, our CTO Christopher Brown, and Rob Cummings of Nordstrom on Thur., June 27, at 11 am PT, entitled, “Building a Coded Business: Culture, Tools, and the Need for Speed.” Register here.

Code Can (help make rad video games).

“At some point you have to deal with reality.” – Chef for Config Mgmt @Facebook

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

As most of you in the Community already know, Facebook uses Opscode Private Chef to automate configuration management for its ‘Carl Sagan big’ infrastructure. That’s very cool, but also pretty widely known.

Today, we published a new angle to the story. If you follow this link (or click the video below), you’ll see a two-minute video of Phil Dibowitz, Production Engineer at Facebook, digging into Facebook’s IT philosophy, his thoughts on why automation makes so much sense (whether you have three servers, or three million), and why Facebook chose Chef in the first place.

As Phil says, “At some point you have to deal with reality. You can postpone automation for a long time and make your life really, really difficult. But at some point your life goes from difficult to impossible.”

For a deep dive into Facebook’s infrastructure, IT philosophy, and work with Chef, check out Phil’s keynote, “Scaling Systems Configuration at Facebook,” from #ChefConf 2013 here.

In the coming days and weeks, we’ll have many more videos of some pretty awesome Chefs discussing the shift to the coded business from a number of unique perspectives.

If you’d like to better understand the benefits of the Coded Business, the changes needed to become one, and how Chef enables those changes, be sure to check out our webinar with Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell, our CTO Christopher Brown, and Rob Cummings, Infrastructure Engineer at Nordstrom, on Thur., June 27, at 11 am PT, entitled, “Building a Coded Business: Culture, Tools, and the Need for Speed.” Register today.

Code Can (automate tons of servers).

“We have Unix engineers now happily automating Windows” – Chef + Cultural Change @Nordstrom

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Lucas Welch — No Comments ↓

Today we launched a new series of Chef testimonial videos offering varied and unique perspectives on the journey to becoming a coded business. The first of these #ChefTalks videos features Rob Cummings, infrastructure engineer at Nordstrom, discussing how to level-up change in your organization.

You can click this link, or the screen shot below, to spend two minutes watching Rob discuss how Nordstrom used Opscode Private Chef to turn a heterogeneous architecture that mixed legacy and new technology into a streamlined DevOps machine. Rob covers recommendations for changing both tooling and culture in traditional organizations, as well as the benefits Nordstrom is beginning to see as part of its ongoing IT transformation.

As Rob comments, “We have hardcore Unix engineers now happily automating Windows infrastructure because they can do it through code.”

Pretty awesome.

For more on up-leveling change in your organization, check out Rob’s keynote, “Level Up Change in Your Enterprise,” from #ChefConf 2013 here and stay tuned for more interesting perspectives from Chef users later this week.

Finally, for even more from Rob on transforming your own organization into a coded business, be sure to check out Opscode’s webinar on Thur., June 27, with Rob, Forrester analyst Glenn O’Donnell, and our CTO Christopher Brown, entitled, “Building a Coded Business: Culture, Tools, and the Need for Speed.” Register today!

Code Can (help up-level organizational change).

In the News – Red Hat Roadmap, E-Commerce Booming

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Lucas Welch — 1 Comment ↓

Need some weekend reading? We recommend checking out SearchDataCenter‘s interview with Red Hat’s director of software engineering Denise Dumas, detailing roadmap plans for RHEL. Meanwhile InfoWorld looks at Red Hat’s new Software Collections 1.0, featuring new versions of Ruby and Python for RHEL.

Also in InfoWorld, Ted Samson takes a look at IBM’s acquisition of SoftLayer and how it stacks up competitively against AWS. For more coverage on the SoftLayer acquisition, check out an interesting counterpoint argument from The Register here.

Finally, All Things D reports that Walmart expects global e-commerce revenue to top $10B this year. Yes, $10B online alone.

Looking for Opscode’s perspective on relevant trends and news, as well as broader lessons for becoming a coded business? Then please stay tuned as our own Christopher Brown will soon be offering a series of editorials on this blog in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, enjoy your weekend!

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