DevOps automation tool leader Chef Software, Inc. has announced today a strong business trend towards DevOps tools amid the rise of web-scale IT—an architectural approach pioneered by web innovators such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google. Chef Software is also releasing a series of new enterprise product features and commercial services designed to help enterprise customers accelerate time to market and power speed, scale, and consistency.

Web-scale computing places a great deal of emphasis on cloud and virtualization over physical hardware. The term web-scale IT was coined by Gartner who released a report that indicated the architectural approach will be found in 50% of global enterprise by 2017, up from 10% in 2013.

“DevOps and web-scale IT is really about a change in practices as to rapid deployment and much larger scale, which depends heavily on automation,” says Colin Campbell, Director of Patterns and Practices at Chef.

The business of DevOps has been good for Chef with the company seeing 182% year-over-year growth in Q2. Chef’s platform has also reached over one million lifetime downloads and launched a new Chef Community site—Supermarket. Developers and DevOps teams alike will want to visit that.

Hoping to hold this upward trend, Chef is looking to capture the web-scale IT wave and that means more support for enterprise functionality.

Commercial enterprise support for DevOps

Chef Software now provides three different tiers of customer engagement for all products, now including enterprise level support.

The first is reactive support: “Do you have a problem? Call us.” The second is proactive support: Included as a subscription, an account manager at Chef Software and a team of engineers proactively keep track of projects and make sure best practices are being followed. Finally, Chef Software still provides consulting services for customers who need on-site hands-on support for setting up Chef.

Chef DevOps Analytics platform

Chef Software has announced the general availability of a new analytics platform. The platform incorporates tools added to Chef through a recent acquisition big data and analytics startup of Tower3, which has provided significant resources to Chef’s analytics applications.

Chef subscribers will access this through the new Chef action log, which publishes notifications on who is changing what on the Chef server and allows administrators to track cookbook usage, roles, environments, and changes to infrastructure, all through an easy-to-use dashboard.

With this system, an IT team could run across a fault or failure, easily track back through what changes happened before that failure, and use that knowledge from the Chef stack to determine the origin of the fault.

Test Driven Infrastructure

Right alongside analysis for DevOps philosophy is the process of automating testing in every step of the chain to speed up deployment. To assist this, Chef is providing commercial support for test-driven infrastructure across the entire stack.

The first version of the Chef Development Kit (Chef DK) was released with a full set of open source tools that cover the entire test and development workflow, from the workstation all the way to production.

Linux container and Docker support

Along with virtual machines, virtual containers are becoming vogue in the DevOps scene—and Docker is leading the way with an elegant solution. Linux containers (LXC) provide an easy way for a DevOps team to prepare a virtual machine once, fix its configuration as an image, and then clone or deploy that image whenever or however the team needs.

Naturally, there are challenges when it comes to deploying container images in a production environment. One issue is known as “the last mile configuration problem” with containers. Because containers are fixed images, you can’t pack everything into the image that deals with configuration–e.g. cryptographic credentials, or other dynamic information that changes over time such as addresses of network components, memcaches, load balancers, etc.

Chef handles configuration that is needed at launch time that cannot be put into a Linux container by anticipating and querying for information it needs to configure it.

For Docker in specific, Chef has released the Knife Plug-in that can handle creation, deletion, and deployment of Docker packages. For containers in general, DevOps teams can look to Chef Container for full support surrounding Linux container configuration at deployment.

Image credit: Chef Logo, http://www.getchef.com/