One analyst likes the vendor's menu for rapid-server provisioning
By now many enterprise IT managers have come to this stark realization: If they don’t become more like a cloud services provider internally, they’ll lose critical application developers to the cloud.
Developers who can write native Android applications and know Ruby on Rails inside out aren’t going to wait six weeks for IT to provision a server. Instead, they’ll turn to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and grab server instances from there. After all, if they’re going to deliver an enterprise application experience similar to what the Generation Y, millennial workforce find with their Facebook and other consumer Web applications, they’re not going to follow stodgy IT processes, says Rachel Chalmers, infrastructure management research director at The 451 Group.
ANALYSIS: Internal cloud are more than just virtualization
“What IT operations teams need to do is figure out how best to provide specialized cloud resources that meet their organizations’ needs without jettisoning the sunken investment in mainframes, client/server and other legacy infrastructure,” Chalmers says.
Opscode, an open source cloud infrastructure automation platform, is worth a look for those organizations, Chalmer says. Essentially what you get with Opscode is the ability to do rapid-scale provisioning and smart configuration for your internal cloud. This is similar to the Puppet automation platform from Puppet Labs, she adds.
Opscode offers Chef, an open source systems integration framework that allows IT to automate system configuration using shareable infrastructure descriptions called Recipes and Cookbooks, says Jesse Robbins, the company’s co-founder and CEO and former site availability specialist at Amazon.com. These infrastructure components integrate with Opscode Hosted Chef, a highly available, dynamically scalable and fully managed automation environment that became generally available as of yesterday after a year in beta.
With the GA release also comes a 99.9% monthly uptime service-level agreement, “Quickstarts” for automation of common application stacks running on Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud infrastructures, as well as enterprise-class support and the ability to run in environments of 50,000 or more servers, Robbins says.
Monthly pricing for Hosted Chef starts at $5 per managed server for 20 servers and scales up to $10 per server for 1,000 managed servers; custom pricing kicks in when the number of servers exceeds 1,000, the company says.
In addition, Opscode this week unveiled Private Chef, a fully supported behind-the-firewall, dedicated firewall appliance delivering the same capabilities as its in-the-cloud predecessor, Robbins says. Private Chef, with a starting price of $80,000, will be available at month’s end.
“I would definitely recommend Opscode to enterprises,” Chalmers says.
