Chef

Infrastructure Automation for the Masses.™

Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration mangement to your entire infrastructure. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure: when a new server comes on line, the only thing you have to do is tell Chef what role it should play in your architecture.

Why you need it

When you automate your infrastructure with Chef, you gain benefits in three areas:

• Economics - Chef saves you money by allowing your business to support larger, more complicated infrastructures with less man-power. Do more with less.
• Efficiency - As you automate your infrastructure, you gain the immediate benefit of never having to go back in six months and repeat yourself. Plus, you won't have to do it all yourself - leverage our vibrant community of experts who are sharing their recipes, collaborating on best practices, and helping each other to succeed. Get rid of all those little "5 minute" tasks, and get ready for the difference in your work-day.
• Scalability - When your find out in the morning that your company is going to be featured on CNN that afternoon, you're going to need some more horsepower. When your infrastructure is built with Chef, that's a snap - just bring the new servers on-line, and let Chef take care of the rest.

How does it work?

Chef works by allowing you to write recipes that describe how you want a part of your server (such as Apache, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state - for example, packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written. We then make sure that each resource is properly configured, only taking corrective action when it's neccessary. The result is a safe, flexible mechanism for making sure your servers are always running exactly how you want them to be.

We put these easy-to-understand building blocks directly on top of Ruby, a dynamic, open source programming language. This means that no matter how complicated your infrastructure may be, or how quickly the state of the art in systems architectures moves, you'll be able to write a Chef recipe that can deal with it.

Finally, we make it easy to run these recipes on your servers. You can start out in "Solo" mode, whose only pre-requisite is a copy of the recipes you want run, and then move up to our fully managed Server environment as you grow.

You can learn more about how Chef works at our community Wiki.

What people like most about Chef

It works the way you want it to

We provide the building blocks that help you to accomplish your goals. At the end of the day, it's about *your* infrastructure being easy to manage. Chef provides the horse-power to get you to where you need to be - it doesn't start out telling you where you should be going.

It is truly a community effort

We released Chef on January 15th, 2009. As of March 1, 2010, more than 100 people and 20 different companies have signed up to contribute to Chef. Companies like Engine Yard and Right Scale have integrated it into their business offerings directly. Many different cookbooks, automating everything from Apache web servers to Xen virtual machines have been published, and put to work in hugely different environments.

When you use Chef, you join a community of professionals who have been there before, understand the problems we all face, and are working together to make things better for everyone. The results are far greater than any of us could have possibly achieved alone.

Chef is Apache licensed

Opscode is an open source company, and we've written extensively about what that means to us. We released Chef under the Apache License to ensure that, no matter how you want to use Chef, you can. No matter how you contribute, the license ensures that we are all equals.

Sharing is the norm

When you ask yourself "how do I configure Nagios?", the Chef Community already has an answer (or multiple ones!) Rather than start from scratch, you can leverage the expertise of others to help you on your way. In the Fall of 2009 we launched the cookbooks.opscode.com, the single best destination to find, share, rate, and comment on Chef cookbooks.

It's built to scale

The founders of Opscode all have deep experience with what it takes to run infrastructure at scale. When we wrote Chef, we put that knowledge to work. The Chef scales horizontally like a web application, and we work hard to make sure that you'll be able to trust that Chef can keep up with even the fastest growing environment.

Get Started

Head over to the Getting Started Guide on the Chef Wiki - it will walk you through what you need to know to get moving with Chef. If you have any questions, you can contact Opscode directly or head on over to the Chef IRC Channel to get some immediate assistance from the community.

Want to know what we're up to next?

Give us some contact info and we'll make sure you're the first to know about new developments at Opscode.