21 January 2010 – IMPACT REPORT

With open source Chef, Opscode offers infrastructure

automation for the masses

Analyst: Rachel Chalmers

In mid-January, Chef celebrated its first birthday. Opscode, the commercial backer of the
project, was understandably pleased with its accomplishments. One hundred people have
signed up to contribute to Chef and 52 – only five of them Opscode employees – have
submitted code. The software now supports Mac OS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD and all major
Linux distributions. Not bad for an infant project that tackles one of the most complex and
urgent problems in all of IT: automated infrastructure management.

The 451 Take

The 451 Group tracked Opsware and BladeLogic, pioneers of infrastructure automation,
from their earliest days and saw them accomplish exits worth $1.6bn and $800m,
respectively. Our December 2009 451 CloudScape report, 'Managing the Cloud:
Automation,' profiled nearly 50 startups dedicated to the technology. Automation is as
ubiquitous and mission-critical as virtualization, but it is far less widely understood. Along
with Cfengine, DTO Solutions and Reductive Labs, Opscode stands in the vanguard of
companies applying open source development methods and economic models to this critical
piece of infrastructure.

Context

Three people founded Opscode: VP of product development Barry Steinglass, CTO Adam
Jacob and CEO Jesse Robbins. Steinglass and Jacob had previously worked together at HJK
Solutions, an automated infrastructure consultancy. At Amazon, Robbins' title was 'Master
of Disaster' and his responsibility was ensuring website availability for every property under
the Amazon brand. He also serves as co-chair of the Velocity Web performance and
operations conference.

The three came together in September 2008 to establish Opscode. The first release of Chef
came on January 15, 2009. Also in January 2009, Draper Fisher Jurvetson led a $2.5m
series A investment round. Today, Opscode employs 11 people and is looking for at least
three more engineers. The company has signed up 25 customers, including Engine Yard,
Rightscale, 37signals and Fotopedia.

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Technology

Chef is a framework for configuration automation. The administrator writes code to describe
how each part of the infrastructure should be built. When a new server comes online, all the
customer has to do is specify its role. Chef takes care of the rest.

In keeping with the Chef metaphor, the source code describing what is done to a server is
called a recipe. Recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state.
Packages may need to be installed, services may need to run or files may need to be written.
Chef's recipes sit on top of the Ruby programming language, making them customizable and
extensible. They're also commendably terse. In November 2009, Ruby guru Kamal Fariz
Mahyuddin published his recipe for configuring an application server. The entire recipe fit in
140 characters on Twitter.

Chef is used in traditional in-house infrastructure but it has also been a hit in various cloud
environments, whether as a management tool for enterprises using Amazon Web Services or
other cloud services or as a way for the public cloud providers themselves to configure and
manage new servers. It is also being picked up by cloud management vendors such as
Rightscale and by organizations with in-house virtual infrastructure of such scale that you
might as well start calling it a private cloud. Still to come: Opscode as a service.

Competition

In the 451 Take above, we bundle Opscode Chef with Cfengine, DTO Solutions'
ControlTier and Reductive Labs' Puppet. That's not a perfect apples-to-apples
comparison. ControlTier and Puppet, for example, are often used together and operate in a
relationship not entirely unlike that of Enigmatec and its spinoff Cloudsoft, with
Enigmatec and Puppet working at the server automation layer and ControlTier and
Cloudsoft providing application services on top.

There's a more compelling reason to assess the open source offerings together, though.
While Chef, Cfengine and Puppet share some characteristics with older configuration
automation frameworks like BladeLogic and Opsware, their relative youth confers certain
advantages. The open source tools were conceived from the ground up for the quick-and-
dirty environments of massive scale-out and cloud computing. They're targeted at a market
where datacenter operators are more and more frequently drawn from the ranks of
developers. They sell best to IT administrators who aren't remotely intimidated by open
source licenses, and who appreciate the opportunity to write code. It's a new world, and one
we hope to describe in more detail in a 451 ICE report tentatively titled 'The Rise of the
DevOps.'

SWOT analysis

Strengths Weaknesses
Chef draws on its founders' hands-on While its youth gives Opscode nimbleness, it's
experiences with scale-out datacenters. It far less well known than some of its decade-

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tackles a critical problem for all cloud old competitors. Enterprises and especially
applications: the need to very rapidly service providers may be facing problems that
provision and configure the underlying Chef can solve, but they probably haven't
servers. heard of Chef yet.

Opportunities
Among the emerging community of
developers are the kinds of savvy, well-
rounded IT professionals who latch onto new
technologies as key to the next five years of
their career. Chef is a natural fit.
Threats
The second BMC Software and Hewlett-
Packard recognize the strategic criticality of
automated infrastructure management, they'll
build or acquire their own next-generation
tools.

Reproduced by permission of The 451 Group; copyright 2009-10. This report was originally
published within The 451 Group’s Market Insight Service.

For additional information on The 451 Group or to apply for trial access, go to:
www.the451group.com

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