Our close friends at CustomInk make it easy for anyone to create customized T-shirts, sweatshirts, and much more online. (Sidenote: We work with them to make all our Opscode and Chef T-Shirts). CustomInk employs proprietary, primarily Ruby-based software applications running on both virtualized and cloud servers to manage everything from its website to its printers. In other words, they are really a coded business. Now, with only four IT ops staff to manage its entire compute infrastructure, the company obviously needed automation to manage its infrastructure and accelerate app dev/delivery.
You can probably guess where this is going…
As Jake Vanderdray, the WebOps Team Lead @ CustomInk said:
“A single ad can double or triple our site traffic, so we’ve got to be able to respond in real-time if we’re going to keep all our customers smiling.”
Using Enterprise Chef and Jenkins CI, CustomInk has automated the building, testing, and staging of applications, speeding the delivery of application updates, while also improving system stability and resiliency. In addition, CustomInk has standardized its infrastructure on a set of Chef Cookbooks shared between development and operations, ensuring maximum transparency across these groups.
Jake added:
“Chef gives us the agility to handle even the craziest surges in demand because everything from spinning up new compute to delivering app updates is automated and rock-solid.”
To get the full run-down on CustomInk’s coded business and the results they achieved with Chef, check out their customer story here.