This week our friends at IBM are hosting their InterConnect 2015 conference and we’re pleased to announce expanding (and existing) support for a wide variety of their products. IBM is synonymous with the Enterprise and they have embraced Chef in a big way. By using Chef across your IBM infrastructure, efficiency is improved and risk reduced as you can pick the right environment for your applications. Whether it’s AIX, POWER Linux or an OpenStack or SoftLayer Cloud, Chef has you covered by providing one tool to manage them all.
In Chef 12 we officially added AIX support and there has been tremendous interest because many large enterprise customers have a significant investment in the platform. By providing full support for AIX Resources such as SRC services, BFF and RPM packages and other platform-specific features, AIX systems become part of the larger computing fabric managed by Chef. The AIX cookbook expands functionality and there is even a knife-lpar plugin for managing POWER architecture logical partitions.
In addition to supporting AIX on POWER, we’re also currently working on providing official Chef support for Linux on POWER for Ubuntu LE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 BE and LE. We plan to release initial Chef client support for all 3 platforms by ChefConf. Once the clients are available the Chef server will be ported to these platforms and we expect to release it early this summer.
Chef is core to IBM’s OpenStack offerings and IBM is very active in the Chef OpenStack community. Chef is used to both deploy and consume OpenStack resources through knife-openstack, kitchen-openstack, Chef Provisioning, and OpenStack cookbooks. Support for Heat is under active development and new features are being released and supported all of the time.
IBM’s SoftLayer Cloud also has great Chef support. The knife-softlayer plugin allows you to easily launch, configure and manage compute instances in the IBM SoftLayer Cloud. There is a Chef Provisioning plugin for SoftLayer under development and they even have a Ruby API for further integrations.
With the Chef client on AIX, the client and server on Linux on POWER, and nodes being managed on OpenStack and SoftLayer clouds; administrators with IBM systems have many options when it comes to managing their infrastructure with Chef. We’ve enjoyed working with them and expect to continue making substantial investments integrating IBM’s platforms to meet Chef customers’ automation needs across diverse infrastructures.