Shinola Detroit

Shinola chose to work with ClearScale to oversee the migration to AWS. ClearScale designed a new deployment that was simpler and more cost-effective thanks to automation with Chef and AWS CloudFormation. Using Chef to automate its cloud infrastructure helped Shinola’s DevOps team be more agile and efficient by automating routine, manual infrastructure management tasks.

Shinola now has a collection of Chef cookbooks that completely automate the company’s infrastructure and server provisioning process, including:

• Apache installation and configuration
• PHP installation and configuration (with all required modules for Drupal and Magento)
• Collectd installation and configuration
• AWS CloudWatch monitoring tools installation and configuration

Further, in using Chef cookbooks, Shinola has the ability to:

• Get code from Git repository
• Create configuration files from templates
• Automatically add MySQL/Memcached/Redis parameters to configuration
• Set basic authentication (when necessary)

The Shinola team also uses Knife, a powerful command line tool from Chef, to manage environments, roles, and data bags, to pull/push data to Shinola’s Git repository, and to upload new code to the Chef server.