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Jon Paul Sullivan, HP Cloud Services
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Chef, an open source project built to automate the cloud, is the systems integration framework that has been most widely adopted by the OpenStack™ community. Chef lets you deploy servers, get them into the state you want, and scale applications. It marries configuration management and service-oriented architectures with the power of Ruby so you can create elegant, fully automated infrastructure. You can also break Chef down to Ruby, the primary language used for automation in OpenStack.
For those who want to know more about Chef, ChefConf 2012, happening in San Francisco, CA from May 15 to May 17, should help you get your recipes and cookbooks ready for business in the cloud.
ChefConf 2012 will be Opscode’s inaugural user conference. HP Cloud Services’ Jon Paul Sullivan will present “Concentrated Awesome: Building the HP Cloud” on Wednesday, May 16 at 10:30am on the Main Stage: Salon A-E.
Jon Paul is a Software Engineer with HP Cloud Services based in Galway, Ireland. For the past 11 years, he has been involved in creating scale-out products for the high performance computing industry. Before being involved in creating the ultimate scale-out product – hpcloud – Jon Paul has written software to deploy and administer products autonomously. He is now guiding Chef usage throughout the hpcloud infrastructure group.
Jon Paul’s talk will introduce hpcloud, show the problems solved by Chef, and share some of hpcloud’s planned next steps in the areas where Chef contributes. HP Cloud uses Chef for fleet management – security patching, for instance, and uses Chef for rolling updates to enable service uptime during deployments of new code.
Cloud infrastructure automation enables efficient scaling, as without automation, you have to scale people in order to scale your infrastructure. And automation tools enable a number of functions needed specifically in the context of public cloud environments, which are multi-tenant, with globally distributed customers, and need to support intra-data center high availability with multiple availability zones. The combination of automation tools and the continuous technical operations and development operations processes that are enabled by automation tools means that any problem a customer may encounter will be fixed right away.
As Opscode is a member of the HP Cloud Services partner ecosystem, Chef is also directly available to HP Cloud Services customers via Opscode’s HP Cloud Services plugin. You can work directly from the command line to create, bootstrap, and manage HP Cloud instances. You assign new servers a role, and Chef takes care of the rest: packages are installed, files are written and each new server is delivered as a cohesive portion of a fully-automated infrastructure. You can consume Chef in three ways: open source Chef, Private Chef, and the Hosted Chef SaaS platform.
An open source project, Chef has more than 600 individual contributors, 120 corporate contributors and thousands of companies using Chef for infrastructure automation.