Another week, another tale of some Awesome Chefs in our Community doing big things with Chef. This time, the story comes from right here in Opscode’s backyard of Seattle. Meteor Entertainment, which publishes free-to-play games globally, with an emphasis on community engagement, needed to scale out hundreds of Amazon EC2 servers to deliver HAWKEN (which rocks, btw), its highly anticipated, free-to-play online game that went into live beta on 12.12.12. To do so, they turned to Hosted Chef™, automating the configuration of their entire EC2 environment.
Managing Meteor’s sophisticated, primarily Windows-based infrastructure presented a number of challenges as the launch date for HAWKEN approached:
– Create mirrored staging and production environments using EC2 resources
– Ensure 100 percent uptime for HAWKEN game platform
– Adapt to changes in cloud resource availability on the fly, all with only two system engineers
Of course, with Hosted Chef automating all the server configurations, HAWKEN launched without a hitch on 12.12.12. In fact, a single engineer delivered the entire production and staging infrastructure for the launch in only six hours. It would have taken five additional engineers to accomplish this feat without Chef.
Sarah Novotny, CIO at Meteor, had this to say:
“Managing a globally distributed environment with only two engineers would be impossible without automation. Hosted Chef lets us bootstrap, run and deploy servers in no time.”
For all the details on Meteor’s use of Hosted Chef please go here. To play HAWKEN for free, please go here.