Chef muscles up with Microsoft, Amazon

Chef, a popular open source software program for managing the configuration settings of servers, software and other IT components, now can reach deeper into the data center with the help of some intertwined services from Microsoft, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Chef 12, released Monday, also comes with a new licensing model that should make it easier for customers to add or remove premium features.

The Chef IT automation software provides a way for administrators to write scripts, often called recipes, to configure and deploy a new piece of equipment or software. Recipes can be used to automate the management of large numbers of assets.

Since its initial release in 2009, Chef has been downloaded over 10 million times. It is used by companies such as Facebook, Hewlett-Packard, Rackspace, AirBnB and others.

To extend the capabilities of Chef, the company has leveraged resources offered by other IT vendors.

For instance, a backup copy of Chef can now be stored and run on AWS Elastic Block Storage (EBS).

Should the main Chef server go down, operations can shift to EBS. Organizations can set up copies of the Chef server in different geographic areas, for extra protection in times of disaster.

Eventually, Chef will also support block storage services from other cloud services as well.

A new replication feature allows users to synchronize configuration data across multiple Chef servers, which can provide a single set of policies across all the locations being managed by Chef.

You could use a single Chef server as a central location for developing policies for configuration and management, said Colin Campbell, Chef director of patterns and practices.

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Chef muscles up with Microsoft, Amazon