Yes, that’s right, folks, Facebook, one of the largest infrastructures on the planet, has deployed Opscode Private Chef™ to automate configuration and management within its web-tier infrastructure.
Why did Facebook need Chef?
Because Facebook’s infrastructure team has to manage thousands of servers, configurations, and administrative access policies across a very dynamic compute environment.
Why did Facebook choose Chef?
Phil Dibowitz, production engineer at Facebook, explains:
“There are three dimensions of scale we generally look at for infrastructure – the number of servers, the volume of different configurations across those systems, and the number of people required to maintain those configurations. Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow. Private Chef provided top-flight support, earlier access to upcoming changes, and additional rich features on top of the functionality in open-source Chef. Further, Private Chef’s basis on open-source Chef also aligns with our own open philosophy allowing us to contribute back to the greater Chef community.”
Pretty cool right?
Even cooler is the fact that Facebook played a role in field-testing the code base for Chef 11, continuing its commitment to open sourcing its best practices and tools to the IT community.
If you’d like to hear the full story, then register to attend #ChefConf 2013 April 24-26 in San Francisco, where Mr. Dibowitz will present a keynote address detailing Facebook’s systems management philosophy, best practices and how these strategies can be implemented successfully in any sized environment.