Chef was built from the beginning as an extensible framework that makes IT professionals’ lives easier. This extensibility has always led to interesting and exciting contributions from the community of Chef users. Innovative solutions for common challenges and process and tooling improvements help Chef users change the way IT works.
Berkshelf is one example of the many tools in the Chef ecosystem that are built to help businesses automate faster. The tool itself is a shining example of our community working together to create something awesome. More than fifty people have contributed code to the Berkshelf project and hundreds more have used Berkshelf to streamline their own cookbook development process. The net result is that developers and operators are happier and have time to work on more interesting automation solutions that will truly help their businesses succeed.
Berkshelf was initially developed to help overcome some challenges faced by the engineering team at Riot Games. The team at Riot immediately realized that the entire community could benefit from the tool and released the software with an open source license.
Today we announced that Opscode will be taking on stewardship of Berkshelf. The key contributors involved in the project: Jamie Winsor, Seth Vargo, Michael Ivey, and Riot Games, will continue their efforts with the rest of the community to make Berkshelf even more awesome.
Be sure to thank Jamie, Riot Games, and the many other contributors who have made Berkshelf such and exciting and helpful tool. This project is a representation of the awesomeness of the Chef community!
You can hear more about this at this week’s Opscode Community Summit and read more in the press release below.
Opscode To Steward Berkshelf
Cookbook Dependency Management Tool has Achieved Widespread Adoption within the Chef Community
Opscode Partners with Chef Community to Maximize Berkshelf’s Potential for Making it Easy to Cook Up Awesome with Chef™
SEATTLE – November 12, 2013 – From the 2013 Chef Community Summit,Opscode®, the leader in IT automation, today announced it has taken stewardship of the Berkshelf dependency management tool. Developed by Riot Games, Berkshelf is one of the Chef Community‘s most notable and popular open source tools. Opscode will dedicate engineering talent and energy in partnership with Berkshelf co-developer Jamie Winsor to maximize Berkshelf’s potential for making it easier than ever to get started and become successful with Chef™.
Berkshelf is a dependency management tool, enabling users to easily track, manage, and maintain the dependencies of their Chef Cookbooks for both infrastructure resources and applications. Using Berkshelf, developers or IT operations personnel can specify the dependencies of any given Cookbook and store those requirements with version controls in an organized repository, ensuring that whenever the Cookbook is used, the appropriate dependencies will be available, as well, all in an automated, repeatable manner.
“We’re energized and inspired by the open source community and amped to contribute time to develop tools like Berkshelf”, said Jeff Hackert, Engineering Manager, Riot Games. “Now that Opscode is taking the reins and leveling up its capabilities, we’re excited to see the possibilities it’s going to play in the Chef user experience.”
“The faster you understand Chef, the more you get out of it and that’s why we developed Berkshelf – to help users get cooking with Chef as quickly as possible,” said Jamie Winsor, Co-Developer of Berkshelf. “I’m hyped to see Opscode putting their energy behind this project and I can’t wait to ratchet up its capabilities even more.”
“Chef contributors extend Chef in innovative ways every day and then open source these tools so all Chef users can benefit,” said Nathen Harvey, Technical Community Manager, Opscode. “Berkshelf is a perfect example of this Community awesomeness. We’re excited to partner with Jamie and the others in the Community going forward in making Berkshelf an even more powerful tool for helping Chef users automate to hyper-speed.”
Opscode will focus its initial stewardship on leveraging Berkshelf to improve the Chef user experience and application developer workflow. In combination with tools like Test Kitchen, which provisions an isolated test environment to run project tests on different platforms, and #learnchef, Opscode’s comprehensive collection of resources for learning and successfully using Chef, Berkshelf provides another valuable tool for Chef users in automating and accelerating their businesses.
The Open Source Chef Community has grown nearly 200 percent across all primary metrics in the last 12 months, including millions of Chef downloads, hundreds of thousands of monthly Chef Cookbook downloads, tens of thousands of registered users, and thousands of individual contributors. The Chef Community currently provides more than 1,100 Cookbooks for automating the creation, management, and delivery of IT infrastructure and applications.
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