Coming out of a seriously rockin’ #ChefConf a week ago, it’s time to profile more customer awesomeness in the Chef Community. This go round it’s a neighbor of ours here in Seattle – Cheezburger, one of the largest social humor sites in the world.
You may be familiar with one or more of Cheezburger’s hilarious sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and Know Your Meme. To keep good times rolling, Cheezburger has automated their hybrid cloud and physical data center infrastructure with Hosted Chef.
Using Hosted Chef for configuration management of its primarily Windows-based infrastructure, Cheezburger can manage all its IaaS and physical resources from a single point of view, providing serious system visibility and control. In addition, Cheezburger customized the Chef Community .NET cookbook, creating a code-based blueprint for managing server deployments.
You can read the full press release below. For all the technical details of Cheezburger’s Hosted Chef deployment, please check out the case study here.
Cheezburger Builds Massive Social Humor Website Network with Opscode
Social Humor Leader Deploys Opscode Hosted Chef™ to Automate Its Hybrid Infrastructure and Drastically Reduce Time to New Cloud Capacity
SEATTLE – May 6, 2013 – Opscode®, the foundation for the coded business, today announced that Cheezburger, one of the largest social humor sites with millions of visitors daily, is now utilizing Opscode’s Hosted Chef™ platform. Hosted Chef automates configuration management and provisioning across the multiple cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) providers and physical servers powering Cheezeburger’s online humor properties.
Cheezburger is home to sites like I Can Has Cheezburger, FAIL Blog, Know Your Meme, and Memebase, providing millions of visitors with laughs they can share again and again. To power its family of sites, Cheezburger leverages a dynamic cloud infrastructure integrating multiple cloud providers, along with a small cluster of physical servers for memory needs. Using Hosted Chef to automate its hybrid infrastructure, Cheezburger can manage all its IaaS instances from a single point of view, providing maximum system visibility and control. By customizing the Chef Community .NET cookbook, Cheezburger created a code-based blueprint for managing its Windows-based deployments, automating full resource configuration across its entire infrastructure.
“As our traffic grows or we make improvements in the efficiency of our platform, Hosted Chef makes it trivial to add or delete servers in our clusters, or even destroy a cluster or build one in a different geographic location,” said Joey O’Neill, Senior System Administrator, Cheezburger. “Opscode’s solution allows us to be agile and quickly respond to changes without worrying about configuration mistakes.”
“Cheezburger’s sites are just straight up funny and they’ve got something for just about everyone,” said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. “By embracing infrastructure as code with Hosted Chef, Cheezburger now has a model for reuse to flexibly scale their computer resources as more and more people discover and share in the hilarity.”
Hosted Chef provides Cheezburger with a comprehensive solution for configuring its infrastructure, including single command cluster deployments of a load balancer, cache server, and HTTP servers in Microsoft Azure, as well as self-aware configuration between Hosted Chef and system load balancers. By automating configuration across its hybrid infrastructure, Cheezburger can ensure system consistency with minimal risk of error.
For detailed information on the results Cheezburger achieved with Hosted Chef, please read the case study here.