Ancestry.com

Family stories are like applications. New ones are created every day.

Ancestry.com helps millions discover, share and preserve their family history. Using Private Chef®, Ancestry.com can rapidly improve its time to market for new services, while reducing costs.

The Challenge

Ancestry.com is the world's largest online family history resource, with 1.8 million subscribers worldwide. To best serve its customers, Ancestry.com leverages thousands of servers across multiple data centers, all supporting a truly service-oriented architecture with intense management demands. Since Ancestry.com's business continues to grow so rapidly, the management demands of its infrastructure can outpace its operations team's resources, necessitating the move to an infrastructure automation platform.

The Solution

Ancestry.com deployed Opscode Private Chef® across its large-scale IT infrastructure to enable automated configuration management and continuous component delivery. With Private Chef, Ancestry.com is seeking a robust infrastructure automation engine installed behind their firewall. This enables more efficient collaboration between development and operations teams in continuously deploying new applications into production. Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com can now bring new services to market in days, versus the weeks it took previously.

The Results

  • Bring new services to market more rapidly.
  • Automated server configuration management and environment creation with a few simple clicks, enabling agile development and efficient operations.
  • Automated application deployment using Private Chef.
  • Adapt to changes on the fly leveraging Private Chef's configuration management database.
"With Private Chef, we've began executing an agile development strategy, significantly accelerating the rate at which we can bring new, sophisticated services to our subscribers." John Esser, Director of Engineering Productivity and Agile Development, Ancestry.com

Ancestry.com Inc. is the world's largest online family history resource, with more than 1.8 million paying subscribers. More than 9 billion records have been added to the site in the past 15 years. Ancestry users have created more than 34 million family trees containing approximately 4 billion profiles. In addition to its flagship site www.ancestry.com, Ancestry.com offers several localized Web sites designed to empower people to discover, preserve and share their family history.

Learn more about Ancestry.com

About Opscode

Opscode is the provider of Chef, the automation platform for the coded business. Opscode Chef provides the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef empowers businesses of all sizes to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage complexity, and accelerate time to market.