Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
With Chef, reusable code brings your infrastructure and services to life on whatever platform you choose. Chef has dozens of plugins to help you with platform-specific cloud APIs, allowing you to use any cloud provider you choose and easily switch between providers.
Chef lets you manage your cloud resources. Automate everything from basic configuration to continuous integration of application updates. Build and rebuild across nearly every public and private cloud platform in minutes or hours, rather than weeks or months. Streamline workflows.
“Hosted Chef gave us a model for reuse that not only makes configuring resources, environments and application testing much less time-consuming, but it also creates a complete documented history of our infrastructure that's critical to our clients' data security.” Glen de Vries, President, Medidata Solutions
Scale up or down by rapidly provisioning and de-provisioning servers on any public or private cloud. Create a fully automated cloud infrastructure that can build, destroy and rebuild on demand as needed.
“Managing a globally distributed environment with only two engineers would be impossible without automation. Hosted Chef's easily reusable code lets us bootstrap, run, and deploy servers in no time, while the repeatable configurations ensure our system's resiliency.” Sarah Novotny, CIO, Meteor Entertainment
See comprehensive resource information and search across your entire cloud-based infrastructure. Provide alerts when systems are out of policy and identify threats before they impact operations.
“Hosted Chef gave us the foundation to build Sensu, which we simply set and let run automatically every half hour to check system health. If something's wrong, we'll know immediately and can easily use Hosted Chef's code repository to automate a fix in near real-time. It definitely helps us sleep better at night.” Pete Zimmerman, VP of Services and Operations, Sonian
Consistently build and rebuild cloud infrastructure on demand as needed. Scale up or down by rapidly provisioning and de-provisioning servers. Take advantage of high-availability clustering.
“To deliver such a multi-faceted service, our infrastructure needs to be able to adapt at a moment's notice. Amazon EC2 gives us the resources we need, but to ensure consistency and maximum flexibility, we had to automate with Hosted Chef.” Ashley Streb, Vice President of Technology at Brightcove
Chef was built from the ground up with the cloud infrastructure in mind. Chef allows you to dynamically provision and de-provision your infrastructure on demand to keep up with peaks in usage and traffic. It enables new services and features to be deployed and updated more frequently, with little risk of downtime. With Chef, you can take advantage of all the flexibility and cost savings the cloud offers.
Chef can handle any infrastructure, no matter the size. One reason for this is that it uses a massively scalable architecture where most of the processing is done on the individual nodes of the network instead of being concentrated into a few management servers. It only takes a small number of Chef server instances to manage even the largest infrastructures.
For provisioning, there are dozens of plugins available, so you're free to pick whatever cloud hosting service you want. An administrative workstation uses the plugin to invoke web service calls for acquiring cloud resources. Here's a diagram that shows how this works.
From an administrator's workstation, you configure the provisioning of the cloud resources. In the diagram, the administrator has requested a new web instance in Amazon EC2. When the new instance starts to run, it makes contact with the Chef server and downloads the chef client. At this point, a secure handshake takes place and the Chef server generates a security certificate that will authenticate the new instance's future requests. The new instance runs the configuration recipes that the Chef server sends to it, depending on its role in the overall application. As a side effect, the state of the Chef server changes. For example, its list of web servers is updated with the name of the new instance. This allows all other nodes to adjust to the presence of the new server. For example, load balancers would be updated with the IP address of the new server.
Here's a brief summary of how Chef can help you scale out your app in the cloud.
Implement High-Performance Operations FunctionalityWhether you're moving an on-premises or hybrid solution to the cloud, or if you're starting from scratch, Opscode can help you create an effective plan.
