SAN FRANCISCO, April 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Opscode^®, the foundation for the coded business, is hosting its second annual user conference, #ChefConf 2013, beginning today in San Francisco. A sell-out crowd of more than 700 attendees has gathered at the Hyatt Embarcadero for two days of technical sessions, leadership sessions, workshops, and presentations from innovators at Disney, Facebook, Forrester Research, General Electric, Nordstrom, and many more about using Opscode Chef™ as the automation platform for the coded business. #ChefConf will focus on actionable strategies and best practices for automating IT infrastructure and application delivery, providing businesses of all sizes with the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy.

Opscode today announced it is collaborating with both IBM (see separate release) and Microsoft in creating comprehensive, open source automation solutions for leveraging both the public and private cloud as a catalyst in accelerating time-to-market and reducing business risk. 

"To thrive in today's global marketplace, organizations of all sizes must transform IT from being simply a back office support function to a front office imperative in rapidly delivering goods and services," said Mitch Hill, CEO of Opscode. "However, the scale and complexity required to do so can be overwhelming. Opscode Chef solves this challenge, automating IT infrastructure to create a coded business with the agility and adaptability to win the race to market."

Chef Community Grows Up

In the past twelve months, Opscode has experienced unprecedented growth in both its commercial customer base and open source Chef Community. Since last year's #ChefConf, Opscode's commercial customer base has doubled in size and half of the company's Private Chef™ customers are Fortune 500 businesses, spanning industries including Transportation, Financial Services, Retail, Media, Manufacturing, and Internet Service Providers. The open source Chef Community has more than doubled in the past twelve months, including more than 25,000 registered users, 1,300 individual contributors, 200 corporate contributors, and 900 Cookbooks.

IBM, Microsoft Join with Opscode to Automate the Cloud

Working with Opscode, IBM will leverage the Chef ecosystem, along with more than 900 available Chef Community Cookbooks, for IBM SmartCloud. This integration further enables IBM SmartCloud customers to automate everything from configuration management of cloud resources to continuous delivery of cloud applications.

Broadening server platform support in the cloud, Opscode also announced that Chef will support IBM Power Systems and the AIX operating system. This support enables enterprise customers to automate the configuration of their mission critical AIX-based cloud infrastructure with Chef. Opscode Chef will provide IBM customers with an easy, step-by-step, highly repeatable, and consistent process for building, managing, and deploying cloud resources and applications in large-scale AIX compute environments.

The companies are also collaborating on creating cookbooks for the IBM Software portfolio, beginning with the WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile. This cookbook will provide reusable content to allow the rapid provisioning and full application lifecycle management of WebSphere Application Server Liberty Profile applications.

Opscode is collaborating with Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., to deliver a series of Chef Cookbooks providing advanced cloud infrastructure automation capabilities for Microsoft Azure. The companies today released new Cookbooks for automating Drupal and WordPress deployments on Windows Azure. Opscode also announced today that Chef provides integration with the new, generally available, version of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. By combining Opscode Chef with Windows Azure, users can automate everything from server provisioning and configuration management to continuous delivery of infrastructure and applications.

Demonstrating the New Private Chef™

From the #ChefConf 2013 main stage, Opscode will demonstrate the latest version of Private Chef™, featuring a robust management console, centralized activity reporting, and "push" client runs, all in a cross-platform cloud environment. Private Chef is based on the rock-solid codebase of Chef 11 and delivers a scalable and robust infrastructure automation solution for large-scale compute environments in the data center, private or public cloud. Private Chef also comes complete with role-based access control and multi-tenancy, enabling enterprises to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage IT complexity, and accelerate time to market.

Private Chef includes a number of key enterprise capabilities for creating a secure, scalable, and robust enterprise-class business based on code:

• Full Infrastructure Visibility: Private Chef offers a powerful graphical user interface enabling customers to easily navigate, visualize and analyze complex infrastructure data through a single view, abstracting infrastructure management away from the command line.
• Comprehensive Resource Information: Private Chef features an easy-to-use Activity Reporting Dashboard providing a single point of reference for the entire infrastructure, enabling enterprise IT teams to more efficiently manage infrastructure and better adapt to change.
• On-Demand Command Execution: Private Chef delivers Push functionality as a Chef Server plugin that enables users to edit and execute command code in real time, increasing IT agility and control across ten or thousands of servers.

About Opscode Chef

Opscode's pioneering software, Chef, is an open-source automation platform built specifically for the coded business. Chef is based on one key insight: What can express users' knowledge of their IT infrastructure and also put that knowledge into action? Code can. With Chef, users model evolving IT infrastructure and applications as code. Chef makes no assumptions about environments or users' approach to infrastructure and process. The result? Infrastructure becomes testable, versioned and repeatable – all as part of an agile software delivery pipeline.

Opscode Chef is available as both on-premise and hosted versions, and as Open Source Chef. Open Source Chef is a freely available, open source Chef server that provides the basis for the on-premise and hosted commercial versions. For more information, please go here.

About Opscode

Opscode is the provider of Chef, the automation platform for the coded business. Opscode Chef provides the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef empowers businesses of all sizes to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage complexity, and accelerate time to market. www.opscode.com.

Press Contact:
Lucas Welch
[email protected]
206-745-0000 

SOURCE Opscode