The way we consume goods and services has fundamentally changed. Thanks to companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google, we expect delightful, intuitive, always-on digital experiences. And it’s not just consumers. Businesses have the same expectations.
The web innovators changed the physics of IT. Using large-scale compute based on commodity hardware and open source software, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and others created an entirely new approach to infrastructure and applications. An approach that is founded on automation, driven by DevOps, and focused on delighting customers. An approach called web-scale IT.
Research firm Gartner estimates that by 2017, web-scale IT will be found in 50 percent of global enterprises. This shift is already underway – and is the driver of Chef adoption.
Today, Chef announced our incremental recurring revenue grew 182 percent year-over-year (YoY) in Q2 and we doubled the number of new Global 2000 customers YoY, as well. We’re proud of these results. And, to us, these results are most interesting as further proof that web-scale IT is hitting the sails of the enterprise.
Just look at the companies who have keynoted at #ChefConf over the past few years – GE, Fidelity, Nordstrom, Target, and more – all Global 2000 organizations. These companies understand that to win in an economy defined by customer delight requires an entirely new kind of IT. Web-scale IT.
We published a whitepaper today that digs deep into the patterns and practices of web-scale IT, and how Chef accelerates and de-risks the journey through this transition for enterprises. It’s definitely worth a read.
Of course, Chef’s stands for more than just automation software. It stands for the Community of practitioners that are bringing web-scale IT to life. Awesome Chefs are everywhere, in companies big and small, living and breathing this transition every day. In fact, we recently crossed 10 million downloads of Chef. That’s amazing.
All of you in the Community know, open source, DevOps, continuous principles, and a focus on delighting customers aren’t “nice to haves”, they’re pre-requisites in today’s economy. And using Chef, you’re driving this approach to great success in organizations of all shapes and sizes.
The future of our Community is vital to Chef as both an open source platform and a company, so if you haven’t yet, please read our founder Adam Jacob’s post on the history of our Community – and the plan going forward.
Much like our Community, Chef itself continues to innovate, iterate, and deliver. Just today we released three new features that directly address core patterns of web-scale IT.
By examining the success patterns of hundreds of our customers, we found that speed, scale, and consistency are not only top priorities for IT; they’re the foundation for success at web scale.
Chef’s new features further extend our platform’s capabilities, beginning with commercial support for test-driven infrastructure and the entire tool chain available in Chef DK. Chef is the first company to commercially support the open source tools in Chef DK, giving you the confidence to create a truly consistent infrastructure.
We’ve also delivered on our customers’ number one request with a new analytics platform, 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. This will also form the foundation for our investments in audit and compliance solutions.
Finally, to continue encouraging innovation in the Community, we’ve open sourced beta code for integrating Chef with Linux containers, including Docker, with Chef Container. This tool kit enables you to easily launch, configure and manage Docker containers. You can read more here about how Chef can make Docker and other Linux containers versionable, testable, and repeatable within a production workflow.
We’re packaging the best patterns and practices of web innovators into Chef, so whether you’re a Fortune 100 enterprise or a startup, you’ll have the IT speed, scale, and consistency needed for web scale.
Web-scale IT is here. Get Chef.
