Earlier this month, we released an important integration with Opscode's Chef, the open source configuration management and integration framework used by thousands of organizations.
Automation of cloud infrastructure has been a focus of enStratus since our inception. enStratus can help you scale easily, recover automatically, backup and burst between clouds with confidence.
In working with our friends at Opscode, we now allow you to take automation to the next level, supporting larger and more complex configurations. When an enStratus customer selects Chef as a configuration management option, a Chef client is automatically installed on new instances brought up by enStratus.
From there, all the power of Chef is available to you. Chef works by allowing you to write recipes that describe how you want a part of your server (such as Apache, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state – for example, packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written. Chef then makes sure that each resource is properly configured, only taking corrective action when it’s necessary. The result is a safe, flexible mechanism for making sure your servers are always running exactly how you want them to be.
In doing so, customers can save time and money by automating new and more complex processes. It also helps companies meet compliance requirements by ensuring policies and procedures are met.
Our latest integration with Chef includes the following capabilities:
In working with our friends at Opscode, we now allow you to take automation to the next level, supporting larger and more complex configurations. When an enStratus customer selects Chef as a configuration management option, a Chef client is automatically installed on new instances brought up by enStratus.
From there, all the power of Chef is available to you. Chef works by allowing you to write recipes that describe how you want a part of your server (such as Apache, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured. These recipes describe a series of resources that should be in a particular state – for example, packages that should be installed, services that should be running, or files that should be written. Chef then makes sure that each resource is properly configured, only taking corrective action when it’s necessary. The result is a safe, flexible mechanism for making sure your servers are always running exactly how you want them to be.
In doing so, customers can save time and money by automating new and more complex processes. It also helps companies meet compliance requirements by ensuring policies and procedures are met.
Our latest integration with Chef includes the following capabilities:
- Easily configure a connection to an Ospcode (or Chef Server) account with enStratus Configuration Mangement
- Automatically perform a Chef run with a custom Chef run list during the start-up of a new server. This allows for the automatic installation and configuration of applications on your server with Chef cookbooks.
- Configuring a Chef run list without having to log on to your server. Just past the run list into the enStratus console and launch the server, everything else will be taken care of by enStratus.
Figure 1: Configuration Management Page
Figure 2: Configuration Management Tab of the Launch Server- This is where you paste a Chef run list when launching a server.
The enStratus development team is working on deeper integration with Chef to extend the configuration management capabilities. We appreciate your feedback and input to the process. Please let us know what else you would like to see, or if you have any questions.
