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Leading Enterprises Embrace Web-Scale IT Automation with Chef

Lucas Welch | Posted on | announcements | ChefConf | community | customers | DevOps | learnchef | press releases

Chef Continues Rapid Growth, Strengthens Partner Ecosystem, and Broadens Community Footprint to Help Companies Thrive in Today’s Digital Economy

SEATTLE – April 14, 2014 – Chef, the leader in web-scale IT automation, today announced that this week’s #ChefConf 2014 will unveil a software and services ecosystem that helps businesses move faster and meet customer demands. The company today also unveiled new partnerships and product enhancements that make it easier for enterprises of all sizes to automate through code and standardize on the Chef platform.

#ChefConf attendance reflects Chef’s blue chip customer portfolio. Keynotes include presentations from GE Capital, Nordstrom, Target, and Yahoo. Nearly 70 percent of Chef’s total sales are from Fortune 1000 companies.

Today’s economy is a digital one. Enterprises must transform their operations to deliver services at speed in order to delight customers and achieve critical competitive advantage. Automation enables developers and IT operations teams to collaborate effectively and deploy software and services more rapidly and at scale. Chef is at the center of this movement. Chef helps enterprises achieve web-scale IT.

The foundation of Chef – the Chef Community – will come together at #ChefConf with the common goal of promoting IT automation in the enterprise.

#ChefConf 2014 News Highlights:

Exponential sales growth: Chef’s 2013 total sales grew 188 percent year-over-year, demonstrating robust demand for Chef’s IT automation platform and its expertise in DevOps skills and adoption patterns.

Massive open source footprint: The Chef Community includes tens of thousands of registered users, with millions of Chef downloads, and thousands of contributors, which demonstrates Chef’s wide adoption and influence across many industries. Chef is building a new generation of IT skills and tools that are turbocharging businesses.

Technology ecosystem unites at #ChefConf 2014: Chef’s ecosystem is expanding as companies including Amazon Web Services, Docker, Google, HP, IBM, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Rackspace, VMware, and others collaborate to empower enterprises to accelerate software delivery and enable enterprises to win in today’s customer-driven economy.

Chef platform expands: Chef continues to extend its open source and commercial automation platforms. The new features accelerate software delivery and simplify infrastructure management for organizations of all types. Featured at this week’s #ChefConf are these platform enhancements:

  • Ease of Use:
    • Download and Management: Getting started with Enterprise Chef has never been easier. 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 even more extensive resources for getting productive with Chef in no time. 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. Featuring Berkshelf, Chef Spec, Food Critic, and Test Kitchen, the first version of Chef DK leverages the best of open source technology to make users productive with Chef in the least amount of time possible.
  • Patterns of Enterprise Success:
    • 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 an easy-to-use dashboard. Combined with Chef reporting, Chef actions delivers the most comprehensive insight into IT infrastructure of any automation platform available today.
    • 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.
  • Community Engagement:
    • Supermarket: Chef has open sourced its community site to provide the entire Chef Community with the means to build the best open source community resource in the industry. 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.
  • Partner Platform Support:
    • 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.
    • For full information on Chef’s support for partner platforms, including AWS, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace, and VMware, see this separate news release.

Supporting Quotes:

“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. 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.”

–        Barry Crist, chief executive officer, Chef

“The Chef community is at the heart of Chef, driving our success and continued innovation. We’re standing united with our Community on a common goal – delightful customer experiences – and whether you’re dev, ops, or something else all together, we hope you’ll join us in making IT better for everyone.”

–        Nathen Harvey, Director of Community, Chef

Additional Resources: