Chef, the company behind the powerful IT automation software for DevOps with the same name, has announced a new freemium business model that merges the software’s existing open source codebase with premium services built for enterprise clients. This change comes in conjunction with the release of Chef 12, which delivers a constellation of new features including further support for Windows PowerShell, VMware vSphere and vCloud, and Docker integration.

Chef 12: A single codebase and “freemium” feature model

Chef 12 changes the way that Chef software is released to users by converging open source and premium features into a unified codebase.

Chef’s CEO, Barry Crist, says that the freemium model is a dramatic change for Chef when it comes to the DevOps company’s relationship with customers.

“We view that the relationship between the supplier and the customer is changing. It used to be that the supplier was the expert and the customer the student,” he says. With the freemium model for Chef, the supplier (Chef) delivers the tools, and the customer relates back by implementing the software on their system and choosing what premium features to use or discard to best fit their needs.

Commercial users can get the open source Chef software and implement it in their system and get access to enterprise-level features but do not need to activate them. Open source customers can easily activate premium features without reinstallation and commercial customers can deactivate premium features as needs change.

The “freemium” model of Chef 12 provides three usage tiers designed to address the entire spectrum of business needs. Chef Enterprise uses the unified codebase alongside a yearly subscription license that delivers access to DevOps experts at Chef, commercial support for the entire tool chain, including open source test-driven infrastructure tools. The standard Chef annual subscription offers per-node backed by standard support. And finally, Chef Essentials provides a free usage tier with premium features for up to 25 nodes for on-premises or up to five nodes for the hosted version.

New baked-in features for Chef 12

Chef 12 includes a brand new analytics platform. This provides a number of features that provide visibility into all Chef activity via action logs and notifications. The goal is to provide greater capability for DevOps teams to understand the history of all changes and to verify integrity and compliance against internal controls.

Windows PowerShell DSC integration has also been integrated allowing users to write recipes that treat DSC resources as Chef resources. This change gives users the capability to provide cross-platform automation and DevOps practices to Windows and Microsoft Azure.

Seamless integration with VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Air is also included giving developers the ability to automate infrastructure across virtual data center and hybrid cloud environments.

As previously announced, Chef 12 also includes the Knlife Plugin for Docker integration as well as end-to-end management of container workflow for virtual containers.

Photo credit: Chef Software, http://www.getchef.com/chef/