This is a guest post by Marco Meinardi from our friends at Flexiant.
Let’s say you need to deliver and operate an application in the cloud, at scale and velocity. Chef is of course essential for providing the automation that enables you to do this. There are other aspects that need to be addressed as well, though. You’ll need to create, adapt and integrate the infrastructure resources that the application will be running on; you’ll need to make sure Chef can operate on these infrastructure resources. And once your application goes live, you’ll need to continuously monitor its performance along with the underlying infrastructure. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about, and I’m sure you’re already using a set of tools to address it. Many cloud providers try to give you the required toolset, however, many times these are not packaged up to provide a seamless, integrated, automated experience through your entire delivery and operation workflows.
Moreover, by using tools from a specific cloud provider, you’ll risk lock in. Even if this doesn’t seem a priority for you right now, what if one day you’ll want to make a different choice? You need to prepare for freedom TODAY. The “best execution avenue” tells how different clouds are a best fit for different workloads. You may want to run a piece of your application on the best performing clouds available, and other pieces on the cheapest ones; you may need different clouds for testing, staging and production; you may want to exploit the geographical reach of many clouds together, to be as distributed as close as possible to the ultimate users of your application, to keep latency down and user experience up. And let’s not forget Murphy’s law: at some point or other any given cloud may experience downtime, and resilience across multiple clouds could give you the continuous availability you need.
Flexiant Concerto was designed specifically to address these DevOps challenges. It takes the awesome power of automation delivered by Chef, integrates it with other amazing tools, it packages them up and orchestrates them all together, to deliver a seamless end-to-end workflow: from zero to Chef and from Chef to the cloud. With Flexiant Concerto, you’ll be able to focus yourself on what you love – developing great software, and operating it to the highest standard.
We recently held a webinar with Chef on how our technologies work together to benefit DevOps – you can see the recording here.
We also got Justin Arbuckle (Chef VP EMEA & Chief Enterprise Architect) to share his thoughts on DevOps and cloud portability.
You can also sign up to Flexiant Concerto for free (up to 3 servers) or at a discount of over 75% for the full 50 servers package by using the promo code FLEXCHEF (only $15 per month) – check it out at concerto.io.