Chef (company)
 | |
| Private[1] | |
| Industry | Computer software[1] |
| Founded | 2008[1] |
| Headquarters | Seattle, Washington, U.S.[1] |
Key people | Barry Crist (CEO),[2] Adam Jacob, Jesse Robbins, Jez Humble |
| Products | Chef[1] |
| Website |
www |
Chef is an American corporation headquartered in Seattle, Washington, which produces software allowing information technology departments to automate the process in which they configure, deploy and scale servers and applications.[3]
The Chef software is used to streamline the task of configuring & maintaining a company's servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Rackspace and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud to automatically provision and configure new machines.
About 70% of Chef’s clients come from Fortune 1000 companies, including major organizations like Facebook, Nordstrom, Disney, and General Electric.[4]
The company was founded as Opscode in 2008 by current Chief Technology Officer Adam Jacob, Jesse Robbins, Barry Steinglass, and Nathan Haneysmith.[5] Chef is based in Seattle, with regional offices in Atlanta, North Carolina, London, and Silicon Valley. Chef is a venture funded company, as of Sep 2015 Chef is valued at $360 million after a $40 million funding round. [6][7]
In November 2015, the company acquired German security startup, VulcanoSec.[8]
Products
One version of Chef’s product, Enterprise Chef, is branded as a solution to managing and automating large-scale infrastructure that includes features such as multitenancy, role-based access control, reporting and support from Chef’s customer service team. This product centers around the notion of modeling “IT infrastructure and application delivery as code.” Users write "recipes" that describe how Chef manages and configures server applications.
An additional product, entitled Open Source Chef, is an open-source free version of the Chef server, which provides the basis for both versions of the software.[9]
Licensing
Chef offers its main Enterprise software in four license types: Free, Launch, Standard, and Premium. The Free version is limited to 5 nodes, and it lacks many of the support options found in paid versions.
Notable Use Cases
While Chef was primarily created as a means to assist with IT Automation/Configuration Management/Infrastructure as Code use cases, it has expanded to serve additional use cases as well.
IT Automation/Configuration Management
Basecamp adopted Chef as a means of “documenting an entire infrastructure setup in a single code base, rather than a set of disparate files, scripts and commands.”[10]
Facebook utilizes a slightly modified version of Chef to manage its infrastructure and keep “. . .its thousands of servers running smoothly.”[11]
Cloud Management
Edmunds.com uses “a plug-in for Chef’s knife tool as a command-line interface for developers to provision resources in CloudStack.”[12]
If not for Chef’s ability to automatically configure Amazon Machine Images (AMI) when utilizing Amazon Web Services, Tout, a short-form video delivery firm, would have had to “build a similar tool from scratch,” and would not be able to “. . .focus on code development.”[12]
Hotel Tonight uses Chef to take out “repetitive, error-prone work” while managing over 100 AMIs.[12]
Continuous Delivery/Continuous Integration
HP Public Cloud employs Chef to decrease the amount of time its developers spend on deployment and testing, providing them with “more time to create new features, enhance code quality, and write better code tests.”[13]
Ancestry.com “created a culture of Continuous Delivery” via Chef in order to better “identify itself as a company that has business agility.”[14]
Safari Books Online utilizes Chef to “push changes to production,” and ensure that “All code was in version control and tested."[15]
DevOps
Web presentation site Prezi uses Chef to “make it easy to jump start infrastructure, share and discover information, and customize and refine” their DevOps process.[16]
Rackspace partners with Chef so that its customers can “Keep Dev and Production environments in sync, enabling faster deployment and quicker time to market of new features,” and “Scale horizontally without manual setup.”[17]
Containers
Chef can automate the creation, management, and monitoring of Docker (software) containers.[18]
References
- 1 2 3 4 5 "Company Overview of Opscode, Inc.". Bloomberg Businessweek. Retrieved 20 March 2012.
- ↑ "Barry Crist appointed as Opscode CEO". Retrieved 15 November 2013.
- ↑ "Was Opscode, Now Chef. IT Automation On The Rise, New Funding, New Name, New CFO". Forbes. Retrieved 9 December 2013.
- ↑ "IT automation startup Chef plans to double staff as sales continue to rise". Geekwire.com. Retrieved 12 February 2014.
- ↑ "Chef - Crunchbase". crunchbase.com. Retrieved 23 September 2014.
- ↑ "Devops software company Chef raises $40M with HP Ventures participating". VentureBeat.
- ↑ "Chef Cooks Up $40M Funding, $360M Valuation". PitchBook.
- ↑ "Chef acquires German security startup VulcanoSec, launches new compliance product - GeekWire". GeekWire. Retrieved 2015-11-03.
- ↑ "Chef™ Growth Soars in 2013". marketweb.com. Retrieved 12 February 2014.
- ↑ "Nuts & Bolts: Configuration management with Chef". signalvnoise.com. Retrieved 27 August 2009.
- ↑ "Facebook uses a seasoned Chef to keep servers simmering". pcadvisor.co.uk. Retrieved 6 January 2014.
- 1 2 3 "Opscode Chef configuration automation tool aids cloud management". SearchCloudComputing. Retrieved 26 April 2013.
- ↑ "ChefConf Readout: Chef to Enable the Full Continuous Deployment Pipeline". HPCloud.com. Retrieved 25 June 2012.
- ↑ Creating a Culture for Continuous Delivery - John Esser on YouTube
- ↑ "Continuous Integration for Chef with Vagrant, Jenkins, and Gitlab". Safari Flow Blog. Retrieved 26 June 2013.
- ↑ How Chef Enables the DevOps Culture at Prezi - Zsolt Dollenstein on YouTube
- ↑ www
.rackspace .com /devops / - ↑ #ChefConf 2014: Mandi Walls, "Demo Session" on YouTube