Opscode has brought its cloud-configuration-management technology, Chef, to Microsoft Windows environments. Chef lets users create “recipes” for configuring and managing infrastructure in an automated and scalable manner, which has made it popular for a variety of complex use cases such as cloud computing and scale-out clusters.
Tuning Chef to work in Windows environments should provide the Seattle-based Opscode with a large pool of potential customers, even if they’re never the majority of Chef users. Private cloud computing, big data and other use cases involving scale-out architectures often rely on the open-source operating system, database, web-server and other components that Chef which with Chef was originally designed to work.
In Windows environments, Chef will be able to automate a number of key components, including including PowerShell, Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL server and Windows services.
An open-source product itself, Chef has already proven remarkably popular both among users needing to simplify deployment of their web infrastructures, as well as among software providers. Dell’s Crowbar tool — which it provides for customers wanting to deploy OpenStack clouds, Cloudera-based Hadoop clusters or Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service environments — is based on Chef. In June, Opscode commercialized Chef with paid hosted and on-premise versions that include professional support.
Opscode among a handful of companies said to be enabling DevOps, a hybrid skillset comprised of application development and operations. The idea is that as traditional application architectures evolve to leverage the new delivery models such as cloud computing, so too must traditional IT job descriptions.
Image courtesy of Flickr user closari.
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