BookRenter Chooses Opscode to Automate Infrastructure to Meet Scalability Requirements
Online Textbook Rental Company Makes Educational Materials More Accessible Just in Time for Students Heading Back to School
SEATTLE, Wash – September 6, 2011 - Opscode, Inc., the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that BookRenter, the largest and fastest growing textbook platform, is successfully using Hosted Chef™ from Opscode to rapidly spin up additional servers and handle application updates and editing without manual interference.
BookRenter also will use Hosted Chef to build the capability to launch a mirror site in a separate datacenter in a matter of minutes, a preemptive move in the event of any kind of outage at its primary datacenter.
Launching the textbook rental category in 2006, BookRenter's mission is to make education more affordable and accessible for university and K-12 students and institutions. The company allows students to rent textbooks for up to 80 percent off the retail price by providing them with the best price, highest quality books and most flexible rental experience.
Facing growing competition in the marketplace, BookRenter needed to not only ramp up its server capacity – which grew from 10 servers to more than 100 in 2011– but also to rapidly deploy a second backup datacenter in a different location.
"From day one, we've always felt it was important to automate, and we couldn't do it without Hosted Chef," said Chris Williams, BookRenter co-founder and DevOps manager. "It would be impossible for any human to manage the complexity that Hosted Chef takes on. Now, we can easily manage different sets of dependencies across our applications and servers, everything from what libraries they require to what systems they need to interact with. These details can be really tricky to manage, especially when building a fault tolerant system, but Hosted Chef makes managing all of this a reality."
With crushing loads annually during two particular academic periods – August thru September and December thru January – BookRenter needed to easily scale resources as server demand increased during those times and as the business continued to grow. Infrastructure complexity became a significant concern. Williams and his staff, who have a Ruby on Rails background, deployed Opscode Hosted Chef to handle their automation needs.
BookRenter also established a secondary location at the beginning of 2011. In its initial test run, the company harnessed to the power of Hosted Chef to switch the live traffic of its servers from the primary datacenter to the secondary datacenter in a matter of 10 minutes with only one minute of downtime. They have since used their secondary datacenter several times when they needed to do extended maintenance on their primary datacenter. Each time it was seamless and easily manageable to switch between the two datacenters.
"We built Hosted Chef with exactly this type of infrastructure in mind – one that needed the ability to automate its cloud infrastructure simply and easily, as well as seamlessly build duplicate server systems as needed," said Adam Jacob, co-founder and chief product officer of Opscode. "BookRenter is an incredible company and we are pleased to help them make the cost of educational materials more obtainable for so many students, both in college and otherwise."
About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineer's time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle.
Learn more about Opscode
About BookRenter
BookRenter launched in 2008 and is dedicated to making education more affordable by allowing students to rent textbooks for up to 80 percent off the retail price. BookRenter helps students find the best price, highest quality books, and most flexible rental experience through their campus store or online at www.bookrenter.com. Offering more than 5.5 million titles and serving millions of students on over 5,000 campuses. BookRenter is one of the fastest growing startups in Silicon Valley. With offices in San Mateo, California, BookRenter is a private company that is funded by prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firms. To learn more about how to use BookRenter for all of your textbook rental needs, please visit www.bookrenter.com.