Automation is an essential enabling factor of the digital world. Chef, a leading provider in the mega-scale IT automation sector, and its community are convening in San Francisco this week to celebrate the expansion of this fast-growing community building around automation. (You can follow the conference at the #ChefConf Twitter hashtag.)
On the business side, Chef announced healthy sales results, with 2013 total sales increased by 188 percent year-over-year. Event attendance reflects the company's top-tier customer portfolio, with keynotes from GE Capital, Nordstrom, Target, and Yahoo, and nearly 70 percent of Chef’s total sales coming from Fortune 1000 companies.
“Many of the world’s leading companies and technology providers are betting on Chef as the de facto standard for web-scale automation in today’s IT-powered economy," said Barry Crist, chief executive officer, Chef. "Our accelerating sales and community growth are built on a strong foundation of customer and partner support, enabling us to deliver speed and scale for forward-leaning enterprises and web innovators alike.”
The Chef Community includes tens of thousands of registered users, with millions of Chef downloads, and thousands of contributors.
Ecosystem Expands, Platform Gets New Features
Chef announced an expanded ecosystem of companies including Amazon Web Services, Docker, Google, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Rackspace, VMware, and others, who are collaborating to empower enterprises to accelerate software delivery and support enterprises.
Chef is extending its open source and commercial automation platforms, adding new features to accelerate software delivery and simplify infrastructure management. Recent platform enhancements include:
- Download and Management: With the latest version of Chef’s commercial platform, a simple download installs and starts the Chef server, making it quicker than ever to access and make the most of Chef.
- Training: Chef’s always growing #learnchef library features extensive resources for getting productive with Chef. Chef also offers a comprehensive suite of online training videos that guide novices and experts alike through all the operational skills needed to stir up delight with Chef.
- Chef DK: Chef DK – Developer Kit – consolidates open source components into an easily installed package that provides a best practice tool chain for building Chef workflows.
- Chef actions: Chef actions is a new feature of Enterprise Chef that provides users with visibility into all activity on the Chef server. Chef actions delivers notifications on who is changing what on the Chef server and allows administrators to track cookbook usage, roles, environments, and changes to infrastructure, all through a dashboard.
- Chef metal: Chef metal delivers policy-based provisioning that allows you to automate entire clusters of machines with the same approach you use to configure a single node. Chef metal automates the provisioning of infrastructure at any scale.
- Supermarket: Chef has open sourced its community site to provide the entire Chef Community with the means to build its own open source community resource. By opening all of Supermarket to the Community, any organization can leverage this collection of code and best practices in order to create its own community resource.
- Networking Automation: Chef recently released full integration with Juniper Junos OS for streamlining the configuration of networking infrastructure. In addition, Cisco’s 3000 and 9000 series switches feature full Chef integration for automating both network port and server configuration from the same platform. Chef also integrates with Arista and Plexxi’s networking platforms.
