SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwired - Jan 28, 2014) - Chef™, IT automation for speed and awesomeness, today announced that Parse has automated hundreds of Amazon Web Services servers with Enterprise Chef™. Parse uses the hosted version of Enterprise Chef and AWS Auto Scaling to manage massive and unpredictable demand for its cloud-based application development services, enabling the company to manage 30-40 different services with only a three-person infrastructure team.

Parse, acquired by Facebook last year, delivers a scalable and powerful compute backend that enables businesses to launch fully featured apps in very little time without worrying about server management. The company leverages hundreds of AWS servers to deliver its cloud app platform, including dozens of services ranging from data storage to push notifications. With a small team and a rapidly growing customer base, Parse needed to automate configuration management across its infrastructure to ensure maximum adaptability and system reliability.

"Our business is pretty 'bursty' with lots of unpredictable spikes, so we have to be able to add capacity on the fly with minimal time and effort," says Ben Hartshorne, Production Engineer, Parse. "This would be impossible without Chef. We can scale up or down in minutes, thanks to a bunch of Chef Cookbooks that helped us automate every part of our compute stack."

Parse has automated the configuration of everything from MySQL to Zookeeper with Enterprise Chef, improving business agility and accelerating the customer feedback loop. Achievements include:

  • Fast Configuration: Zookeeper is an open source application for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services within IT infrastructure. Traditionally a very complex application, Parse installed Zookeeper on hundreds of AWS servers in less than a day using Enterprise Chef.
  • Response Speed: When unforeseen demand spikes exceed Parse's infrastructure capacity, its IT team spins up batches of new AWS servers with Auto Scaling and lets Chef automate configuration and deployment, bringing fully configured compute capacity online in minutes.
  • Reusable Code: The Chef Community features over 1,000 Cookbooks -- collections of tested, reusable code -- providing the Parse team with repeatable code that saves lots of man-hours.

"Parse sees the world much like we do, meaning they know that application development must move at the speed of customer demand," comments Adam Jacob, Chief Dev Officer, Chef. "With Chef as the automation engine, Parse's cloud platform gives devs what they need to rock out awesome apps as fast as they can code."

About Enterprise Chef

Chef models IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, providing the integrated tool chain and automation platform to achieve the speed necessary to succeed in today's customer-propelled economy. Chef delivers the power and flexibility to move faster in a complex world -- from rapid provisioning and deployment of IT resources to the automated delivery of applications and services -- at any scale.

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We are Chef. We are IT automation for speed and awesomeness. We give you a model for automating IT infrastructure and applications that drive self-reliance across your development and operations teams. We are the Chef Community. We are tens of thousands strong. We are helping your businesses become faster, safer and more flexible, so you win in today's 24x7 digital economy. Join our movement today. www.getchef.com