Opscode Ships Infrastructure Automation for Public, Private Clouds 
Opscode Inc. has released to GA its Hosted Chef cloud infrastructure automation solution and announced a new Private Chef, which bundles Hosted Chef components into an appliance for on-premise enterprise private clouds. Both products are based on Opscode’s open-source systems integration framework for automating critical cloud operations.
Opscode Inc. has released to GA its Hosted Chef cloud infrastructure automation solution and announced a new Private Chef, which bundles Hosted Chef components into an appliance for on-premise enterprise private clouds. Both products are based on Opscode’s open-source systems integration framework for automating critical cloud operations.
Also this month, Opsocde announced new partners and customers, including Dell, OpenStack, Rackspace, Grid Dynamics and DTO Solutions.
“Opscode provides a suite of proven cloud automation infrastructure solutions that enables organizations to configure servers and scale applications throughout the enterprise just as quickly as the cloud can deliver them.” said Jesse Robbins, co-founder and CEO of Opscode in a statement.
Under the covers, Opscode’s Chef is an open-source systems integration framework (or infrastructure scripting automation software) built to bring automate such cloud tasks as deploying servers, scaling applications and others. Chef combines configuration management and SOA with the Ruby scripting language – the goal is to make it easier for IT teams to create an agile and automated infrastructure.
Chef lets users write what Robbins calls “recipes,” which describe the way IT teams want to configure server assets (Apache, MySQL, Hadoop, etc.) These “recipes” include descriptions of all the resources that should be in a particular state (such as packages that should be installed, services that should be running, files that should be written, etc.) Chef comes in and enforces these recipes, ensuring that each resource has been properly configured and making sure they stay that way after provisioning and operations.
Chef also lets IT create clones of many critical environments, including QA, pre-production, partner previews – providing an infrastructure blueprint. This lets IT build (or rebuild) their infrastructure automatically in minutes or hours – rather than days or longer.
For flexible cloud operations, Chef also lets users adapt on the fly. Notably, because Chef is infrastructure aware, it automatically discovers thousands of data points about existing and new systems. This means, as an example, that when IT needs to know which web servers to load balance in production, the user can simply ask Chef – without any need to change source code, or manually reconfigure based on static documentation. Similarly, for data resources, when a company needs to model new classes of data, the Chef API can store that information, and allow IT to re-use the data instantly.
A recent Opscode survey found 84% of respondents were confident that their organizations would move to a private or public cloud in the next 12 months. Two-thirds (66%) said they were already moving to the cloud or had plans underway.
