SEATTLE, June 27 — Opscode, the leader in cloud infrastructure automation, today announced that it has released Chef for OpenStack, a reference deployment for building and managing OpenStack clouds. Sponsored by Intel and driven by contributions from Rackspace, along with Dell, DreamHost, HP and the wider OpenStack community, Chef for OpenStack includes five cookbooks enabling rapid deployment and automation of computing, object storage, image services, dashboard and identity services of the latest version of OpenStack, codenamed Essex. Versions of the cookbooks will also be published for the Intel CloudBuilders community, a cross-industry initiative aimed at making it easier to build, enhance, and operate cloud infrastructure.

Opscode also today announced the completion of a new knife command-line plugin for OpenStack Essex, enabling users to rapidly create, bootstrap and manage OpenStack Essex compute instances. With Opscode Chef, OpenStack users can automate everything from server provisioning to application deployment in OpenStack-based cloud architectures directly from the command line, ensuring infrastructure is consistent and easily scalable.

Opscode has released a centralized repository consolidating the new cookbooks, instructions, and documentation to enable a greater industry collaboration ecosystem. This open developer and operator community has a mailing list and an IRC channel and will continue to accelerate innovation in driving the future of OpenStack deployment.

"OpenStack is rapidly evolving into the primary open source platform for deploying private and public clouds," said Bryan Hale, director of Business Development, Opscode. "With Intel as a technical advisor and with contributions from the broader OpenStack community, we are stewarding best practices for automating OpenStack infrastructure and driving toward more innovative and effective collaboration within the OpenStack community."

"Intel believes having an automation framework such as Opscode Chef to complement OpenStack is a critical addition to the OpenStack community," said Billy Cox, director of Cloud Software Strategy, Intel. "We're excited to help drive the next generation of collaboration and new thinking within the OpenStack community by offering a central location for current code documentation and shared best practices."

Opscode today released five cookbooks – collections of re-usable code – featuring contributions from OpenStack participants Rackspace, Dell, DreamHost, HP and a number of other contributors. These cookbooks provide code repositories specific to each core component of OpenStack's latest Essex release, including:

• OpenStack Compute: Enables enterprises and service providers to offer on-demand computing resources, by provisioning and managing large networks of virtual machines. Compute resources are accessible via APIs for developers building cloud applications and via web interfaces for administrators and users.
• OpenStack Object Storage: Provides a fully distributed, API-accessible storage platform that can be integrated directly into applications or used for backup, archiving and data retention.
• OpenStack Dashboard: Provides administrators and users a graphical interface to access, provision and automate cloud-based resources.
• OpenStack Image Service: Provides discovery, registration and delivery services for disk and server images.
• OpenStack Identify Service: Provides a central directory of users mapped to the OpenStack services they can access, acting as a common authentication system across the cloud operating system.

By providing a centralized, defined collection of code for automating entire OpenStack infrastructures, Opscode is enabling organizations to maximize the potential of the OpenStack platform in driving greater business agility and operating efficiency. Using Opscode Open Source Chef™, Hosted Chef™ or Private Chef™, OpenStack users can quickly and consistently deploy every OpenStack component, delivering full stack automation for OpenStack-based public and private clouds.

To access, collaborate or learn more about Chef for OpenStack, please visit www.opscode.com/openstack.

OpenStack Essex, the fifth version of OpenStack, focuses on quality, usability and extensibility across enterprise, service provider and high performance computing (HPC) deployments. OpenStack Essex allows users across the globe to leverage pools of on-demand, self-managed compute, storage and networking resources to build efficient, automated private and public cloud infrastructures.

About Opscode Chef

Opscode's pioneering software, Chef, is an open-source systems integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. No matter how complex the realities of business, Chef makes it easy to deploy servers and scale applications throughout an entire infrastructure. Through a combination of configuration management and service-oriented architectures, Chef, Hosted Chef and Private Chef make it easy to create an elegant, fully automated infrastructure while simplifying systems management. The Chef community features 13,000 registered users, 750 individual contributors, 135 corporate contributors and 500 cookbooks, providing a rich ecosystem of support for customers looking to make the most of their investment in the cloud.

About Opscode

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. Opscode helps 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. More information can be found at www.opscode.com.

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Source: Opscode