First up, InformationWeek examines Forrester Research’s new report grading the many Platform as a Service (PaaS) platforms available for developers. Find out where Salesforce.com, Microsoft Azure, and many others ranked here.

In more cloud news, InfoWorld examines 12 ‘clever tools’ for dev and ops using cloud resources, including the Opscode Chef platform. See what InfoWorld had to say here.

Finally, General Electric announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services this week to build a big data analytics and storage platform in the public cloud. More info at The Register. We’ll have to wait and see what comes of the project.

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.

“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.

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.”

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

BranchOut’s Dev team needed to move fast, often faster than Ops could manually configure and deploy AWS instances. So Jeremy established a new configuration and deployment process using Hosted Chef, Scalr, and GitHub. Jeremy and his team combined Chef and Scalr to automate resource configs and create a central portal for viewing the entire infrastructure across environments. Then, they customized the Chef Community cookbook for Apache Tomcat to integrate additional Java components, giving them a push-button code deployment for all their AWS servers. Now, BranchOut’s Ops team can expose its server configuration code to the Dev team, so Devs can simply choose the configuration they need from GitHub, copy and paste the code into their AWS environment, and deploy the resources they need. This workflow makes Devs more self-reliant, while the infrastructure remains consistent on rock-solid config code.

Here’s what Jeremy had to say:

“Hosted Chef makes it easy for anyone on our team to deploy the resources they need. Because it integrates so well with Scalr, we have an additional level of transparency that gives us a real DevOps mentality – we’re all on the same page about what’s been done and what needs to be done.”

Very cool stuff. A big thanks to Jeremy and BranchOut for letting us tell their Chef story. To go deeper into BranchOut’s infrastructure, you can read the full case study here.