Twitter. Digg. Facebook. 37Signals. These are companies known on every continent. They are not publicly traded and don’t have huge offices or development teams around the world.
How can such small teams build applications with such robust IT specifications? For one, virtualization is allowing small to medium businesses to stretch their IT dollars a lot further. There are also tools like Opscode’s Chef which help automate the cost prohibitive and time intensive work sys admins have always had to do. Opscode’s goal is to take the focus off the “muck that is infrastructure”, allowing companies to dedicate more resources towards value adds for their applications.
According to the Opscode website,
“Chef is an open source systems integration framework built to bring the benefits of configuration management 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.”
Chef allows you to write and share “Cookbooks”, which are preconfigured extractions that automate everything from Apache web servers to Xen virtual machines. Companies like RightScale and EngineYard are contributors to the project already and Opscode publishes cookbooks for 70+ different parts of your infrastructure.
Learn how to eliminate lower level sys admin tasks by listening to Opscode VP of Services John Willis and Opscode customer Seth Chisamore of digital agency MaxMedia.
Find out more at:
Opcode’s website: http://www.opscode.com
Opscode’s blog: http://www.opscode.com/blog/
Opscode’s Crunchbase Profile: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/opscode
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