Customer Stories
Increase cloud adoption and automate on AWS
Chef’s infrastructure automation technology paired with AWS cloud services gives Shinola the benefit of cloud at scale, with agility and efficiency.
Shinola chose to work with ClearScale to oversee the migration to AWS. ClearScale designed a new deployment that was simpler and more cost-effective thanks to automation with Chef and AWS CloudFormation. Using Chef to automate its cloud infrastructure helped Shinola’s DevOps team be more agile and efficient by automating routine, manual infrastructure management tasks.
Shinola now has a collection of Chef cookbooks that completely automate the company’s infrastructure and server provisioning process, including:
Our clients are able to focus on more strategic projects, and save significant time by automating routine tasks.
- Apache installation and configuration
- PHP installation and configuration (with all required modules for Drupal and Magento)
- Collectd installation and configuration
- AWS CloudWatch monitoring tools installation and configuration
Further, in using Chef cookbooks, Shinola has the ability to:
- Get code from Git repository
- Create configuration files from templates
- Automatically add MySQL/Memcached/Redis parameters to configuration
- Set basic authentication (when necessary)
The Shinola team also uses Knife, a powerful command line tool from Chef, to manage environments, roles, and data bags, to pull/push data to Shinola’s Git repository, and to upload new code to the Chef server.
About Shinola Detroit
Shinola Detroit, a company dedicated to producing American built products, including watches, bicycles, leather goods, and journals of high quality, wanted to get ready for the holidays – their peak sales time – and needed to be able to scale their ecommerce website to 10x current traffic.
The company had a different dedicated solution in place, and in order to meet the potential demand spikes, the company would have to lease more servers and wasn’t confident in the ability for the existing solution to meet its needs. After evaluating its options, Shinola decided to move its ecommerce website infrastructure to AWS to enable them to autoscale and handle the holiday traffic cost-effectively.
Chef’s infrastructure automation technology paired with AWS cloud services give our clients the benefit of cloud at scale, with agility and efficiency.
Why Chef?
Chef turns infrastructure into code. With Chef you can automate how you build, deploy, and manage your infrastructure. Your infrastructure becomes as versionable, testable, and repeatable as application code.
Chef relies on reusable definitions known as recipes to automate infrastructure tasks. Examples of recipes are instructions for configuring web servers, databases and load balancers. Together, recipes describe what your infrastructure consists of and how each part of your infrastructure should be deployed, configured and managed.
Benefits of Working Together on AWS
The ClearScale team saw the advantage of utilizing Chef’s infrastructure automation technology from the beginning. “ClearScale has been using Chef technology since day one, and we formalized our partnership in 2012. Chef is a powerful system configuration management tool that enables customers to automatically provision and configure new instances on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Their infrastructure automation technology is top-of-the-line,” said Pragin. ClearScale uses Chef solutions in many of its client projects to fully automate clients’ cloud infrastructure. “This helps our clients take a DevOps approach, by treating their infrastructure as code and enabling faster time-to-market, improved deployment frequency, and more stable operating environments,” said Pragin. He continued, “Chef’s infrastructure automation technology paired with AWS cloud services give our clients the benefit of cloud at scale, with agility and efficiency. Our clients are able to focus on more strategic projects, and save significant time by automating routine tasks.”
It was a natural fit from the beginning for the Chef team to engage with ClearScale, as Chef felt that its technology complimented and could further enable ClearScale’s mission of delivering excellent results to clients migrating to and optimizing
environments on AWS. “ClearScale’s extensive experience with AWS and Chef helps increase cloud adoption while improving client satisfaction,” said Ken Cheney, VP at Chef.
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