Peek Infrastructure Automation with Opscode Chef + Ubuntu & Amazon EC2

Peek makes a simple mobile device that sends & receives unlimited email (& SMS, twitter, facebook, and more) from anywhere in the US for a low monthly fee. It’s kind of like an email-only Blackberry, and is super cool.

The Peek is becoming quite popular & they are continuing to grow in EC2. Dan Morel, Peek’s Chief Geek, explains why he chose Chef to help Peek scale their cloud infrastructure on his blog:

[…]we wanted to use a strategy where we had really raw AMIs, basically with just the OS running on it. And then we’d use “something” to add all of our packages and do everything we needed to turn a raw server into something useful.

My eyes got turned on to Chef a while back. So I decided to try it out. Well, 3 days later, Chef has delivered everything I hoped for… and even a bit more. We can now launch an EC2 image that only runs Ubuntu + Chef. Chef then installs everything we need:
-jboss
-java
-glusterfs
-users, groups, sshkeys
-snmp and all our crazy snmp scripts for monitoring
-and so on….

Its pretty amazing in its power now that its running. I can launch a new node in a few minutes, and I can easily upgrade it along the way

We’re really excited to see more and more great technology using Chef, and particularly excited to see Chef being used to help automate, configure, and manage mobile devices & services. Thanks for the shout-out, Dan, and keep up the good work!

(PS: Get a Peek device at Amazon!)