Opscode Chef configuration automation tool aids cloud management

Grazed from TechTarget.  Author: Beth Pariseau.

Configuration automation tools like Opscode Chef aren’t just for DevOps anymore.  They also come in handy for provisioning resources at the speed of cloud, according to attendees at ChefConf 2013 here this week.   "Half the time, our developers don’t know where CloudStack ends and Chef begins," said Joshua Miller, Linux administrator for Edmunds.com, a publisher of automotive information websites based in Santa Monica, Calif. Edmunds uses a plug-in for Chef’s knife tool as a command-line interface for developers to provision resources in CloudStack.

"Developers are spinning up and blowing away systems at a rate of dozens a week and hundreds per month," Miller said. "If the operations team had to handle all that, we couldn’t deliver on it."  Instead, the ops team focuses on improving the integration between Opscode Chef and CloudStack, and other higher-level duties than provisioning and configuring servers, Miller said…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) users also find Chef useful for rapid configuration of resources in the cloud.  If not for Chef, the team at Tout, a short-form video delivery firm based in San Francisco, would have had to build a similar tool from scratch, according to Matt Lanier, keeper of keys and grounds for the company…

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