HPC in the Cloud: MercadoLibre Deploys Opscode Chef to Automate Its OpenStack Private Cloud

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February 07, 2012

MercadoLibre Deploys Opscode Chef to Automate Its OpenStack Private Cloud

Leading e-commerce company with presence in 14 countries uses chef to automate cloud infrastructure and manage rapid deployment of new infrastructure and applications

SEATTLE, Feb. 7 — Opscode, Inc., the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that MercadoLibre, the largest e-commerce/online auction company in Latin America and among the largest e-commerce retailers in the world, has deployed Opscode Chef to automate its OpenStack cloud infrastructure and enable rapid deployment of new infrastructure and applications.

MercadoLibre has 62 million registered users and receives 2 million requests per minute. The publicly traded company has a significant presence in 14 countries. With two datacenters housing 6,000 virtual machines, MercadoLibre deployed Opscode Chef to successfully handle all of the configuration, management and automation of its server structure.

"We recently moved to an OpenStack private cloud and needed a strong solution to handle automation, replication and duplication of infrastructure configuration, speed up processes and help us automate continuous delivery of applications," said Leandro Reox, senior infrastructure engineer and cloud architect at MercadoLibre. "With Opscode Chef Cookbooks and recipes, we were able to definitively accelerate our time-to-value and time-to-market, which results in operational efficiency and cost savings. Chef's biggest advantage is the amount of time we save in setting up virtual servers and other tasks."

With the adoption of OpenStack and Opscode's Chef solution in the last six months, MercadoLibre's IT team no longer needs to spend as much time and resources deploying and managing physical servers. Previously, deployments could take hours, even days. Using OpenStack and Opscode Chef, deployments are measured in minutes and seconds.

Additionally, MercadoLibre's development team is able to directly deploy APIs and apps, without the intermediary steps involving the IT team, enabling nearly unlimited growth. MercadoLibre's developers are now able to commit and deploy new applications themselves. Previously, those deployments were restricted to once a day. Now they are accomplished two to three times a day.

"Opscode is proud to be a part of MercadoLibre's dynamic growth," said Adam Jacob, co-founder and chief customer officer at Opscode. "They are employing Chef to quickly and easily scale their OpenStack private cloud and automate their cloud infrastructure. OpenStack is the leading open-source framework for building public and private clouds, and MercadoLibre is well ahead of the curve for adopting and using OpenStack and Chef in this way."

Chef is a systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout a company's entire infrastructure. It combines the fundamental elements of configuration management and service-oriented architectures with the full power of the Ruby programming language to enable enterprise customers – such as MercadoLibre – to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure that can support continuous application deployment.

Opscode has developed Chef Cookbooks that automate the installation and management of OpenStack. These Chef Cookbooks enable easy deployment and automation of the core components of OpenStack, including computing, object storage, virtual machine image services, dashboard and identity. Opscode has served as a deployment pioneer to the OpenStack open source cloud project since the association's inception and worked closely with Rackspace and Dell to make the creation and deployment of OpenStack clouds easy and consistent. Opscode Chef powers the majority of sites deploying OpenStack, including Voxel, Cloudscaling, and now MercadoLibre, among others.

About Opscode

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment; and save developers and systems engineers time and money. Opscode's team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

About MercadoLibre

Founded in 1999, MercadoLibre is Latin America's leading e-commerce technology company. Through its primary platforms, MercadoLibre.com and MercadoPago.com, it provides solutions to individuals and companies buying, selling, advertising, and paying for goods online. MercadoLibre.com serves millions of users and creates a market for a wide variety of goods and services in an easy, safe and efficient way. The site is among the top 10 in the world in terms of page views and is the leading retail platform in unique visitors in each country in which it operates according to metrics provided by comScore Networks. MercadoLibre maintains a leadership position in 12 Latin American countries. The Company is listed on NASDAQ (NASDAQ:MELI) following its initial public offering in 2007. For more information about the company visit: http://investor.mercadolibre.com/.

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Source: Opscode

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