Facebook Opscode Deal: Facebook Teaming Up with Opscode

Facebook Opscode Deal: This morning it has been announced that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) will be teaming up with Opscode, a company that refers to itself as “the leader in cloud infrastructure automation.”

You may be wondering how Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) and Opscode are going to work together. In short, the social networking giant is turning to the company’s Private Chef feature to “automate configuration and management within its web-tier infrastructure.”

For everyday users of Facebook, this may not sound like something that is important. However, nothing could be further from the truth. By using Private Chef, Facebook will be able to manage “thousands of servers, configurations, and administrative access policies within its dynamic compute environment.”

For a better idea of why Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is interested in teaming up with Opscode, here is a quote from Facebook Production Engineer Phil Dibowitz:

“There are three dimensions of scale we generally look at for infrastructure – the number of servers, the volume of different configurations across those systems, and the number of people required to maintain those configurations.”

“Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow. Private Chef provided top-flight support, earlier access to upcoming changes, and additional rich features on top of the functionality in open-source Chef. Further, Private Chef’s basis on open-source Chef also aligns with our own open philosophy allowing us to contribute back to the greater Chef community.”

In short, Opscode is an open source product that makes it simpler for IT personnel to manage servers, admin access, and configurations from one location.

Here is what Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer of Opscode had to say:

“Facebook’s infrastructure is both truly unique and a model for the future of enterprise computing. Their use of Private Chef to automate and manage this large-scale infrastructure illustrates the power of Chef in solving some of the most critical and complicated IT challenges on the planet.”

“But, more importantly, Facebook’s use of Chef demonstrates Facebook’s continuing commitment to open source and sharing their own best practices to help anyone trying to manage just a few servers, or ten thousand.”

It is easy to look at this partnership from the outside and wonder why it is such a big deal. However, if you were part of the Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) IT team you would realize that something like this is a huge benefit.

Check back here for more updates on Facebook Opscode Deal.

DISCLOSURE: I have no positions in any stock mentioned.

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