TR35 Honorees to be Recognized at Technology Review’s Emtech MIT 2011 Conference in October
SEATTLE, Wash – August 23rd, 2011- Opscode, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that Jesse Robbins, Opscode co-founder and chief community officer, has been recognized by Technology Review magazine as a TR35 Honoree for 2011. The TR35 recognizes the world’s top innovators under the age of 35, spanning energy, medicine, computing, communications, nanotechnology and other emerging fields.
Robbins has been honored for his leadership in the Web Operations and DevOps community, founding Opscode, and the creation of of the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference. He was selected as a member of the TR35 class of 2011 by a panel of expert judges and the editorial staff of Technology Review, who evaluated more than 300 nominations. Robbins will join other TR35 honorees in discussing their achievements at the Emtech MIT 2011 conference, taking place Oct. 18-19 at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass. All of the TR35 winners for 2011 will be featured the September/October issue of Technology Review and online at www.technologyreview.com/tr35/.
“Technology innovation is key to driving growth and progress in the areas of research, medicine, business and economics,” said Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review. “This year’s group of TR35 recipients is driving the next wave of transformative technology and making an impact on the way we live, work and interact. We look forward to profiling and working with these technology leaders each year, and watching their continued advancement in their respective fields.”
In 2008, Robbins and his team founded Opscode to “bring infrastructure automation to the masses,” fueled by their passion for building infrastructure and a vision for how it could improved. In January 2009, the team released Opscode Chef®, the open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud and datacenter. Chef enables developers and systems engineers to write source code, in the form of recipes, which describe how an infrastructure should be built.
Recipes can be shared in cookbooks on the Opscode Community site where thousands of people publish and share them. This allows developers to start building complex infrastructure in minutes, without having to initially write code or configure systems by hand. When coupled with cloud providers like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace, they can go from “bare metal” to a fully operational website or Hadoop cluster in minutes with a single command.
Chef saves developers and systems engineers time, and provides incredible agility. Instead of spending weeks learning, building, configuring and managing infrastructure, they are building new cool stuff. This has enabled thousands of organizations to build scalable, efficient, highly available websites and cloud-enabled enterprises.
Recently, Opscode announced a suite of new products and services targeted at the enterprise market, including the general availability of Opscode’s Hosted Chef, which has more than 4,500 customers using the solution. It also launched Opscode’s Private Chef, which bundles all of the benefits of Hosted Chef within an appliance behind the corporate firewall.
“We founded Opscode and created Chef to bring world-class infrastructure automation to everyone,” said Robbins. “We want every software developer, systems engineer and architect to have the best tools available to succeed in this new environment. Opscode exists to help people do the hard stuff, automate away the boring stuff and focus on the awesome stuff that makes a difference.”
Robbins added, “I am incredibly honored to be recognized by the TR35 for my contributions to the web, and will use this opportunity to bring greater attention to other innovators in our community.”
Additional information about past and present TR35 winners and judges is available at www.technologyreview.com/tr35/. For more information about Emtech MIT 2011, visit www.technologyreview.com/emtech.
Jesse Robbins is co-founder and chief community officer of Opscode, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Robbins is a widely recognized expert in infrastructure, web operations and emergency management.
Robbins was founding chair of the Velocity Web Performance and Operations Conference, editor of the Web Operations book and is a contributor to the O’Reilly Radar blog. Prior to founding Opscode as CEO in 2008, he worked at Amazon.com with the title of “Master of Disaster,” where he was responsible for website availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.
Robbins has served as a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and emergency manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.