Chef's Working On The PaaS

Application virtualization platform company GigaSpaces is detailing the mechanics of its new partnership with open source cloud infrastructure automation firm OpsCode.

The partnership is intended to marry GigaSpace's Cloudify open PaaS stack with OpsCode's Chef, an open-source systems integration framework for automating the cloud.

NOTE: Chef is said to combine the fundamental elements of configuration management and service-oriented architectures with Ruby. Chef users write "recipes" that describe how they want a part of a server (such as Apache, MySQL, or Hadoop) to be configured.

GigaSpaces wants us to focus on the fact that Cloudify supports application-level orchestration on "any cloud" in practice. The firm's VP of product management Uri Cohen says that the flexibility of this product will help development teams move both new and existing apps to the cloud, especially where "massive migrations of tens or even hundreds of apps" are involved.

"With its new built-in recipes, Cloudify provides consistent management and cloud portability for popular big data tools, exponentially reducing the operational and infrastructure costs involved with running these systems," said Cohen.

In turn, OpsCode's Chef is now thought to be in a position where it can help leverage the Cloudify approach to augment and expand the traditional DevOps model to include key on-going management tasks.

"The concept of DevOps and recipes can go well beyond setup, to actually manage the entire lifecycle of your applications — from setup, to monitoring, through maintaining high availability, and auto-scaling when required. This is where Cloudify and Chef come together," said Bryan Hale, director of business development for OpsCode.

In addition to the integration with Chef, this new release also includes the following features:

• Complete application-level orchestration, allowing automated provisioning, deployment, management, and scaling of complex multi-tier apps to any cloud environment
• Built-in, ready-to-use recipes for common big data components, such as Hadoop, Cassandra, and MongoDB
• Support for non-virtualized environments (aka Bring Your Own Node), allowing you to treat an arbitrary set of servers as your "cloud" and have Cloudify deploy and manage applications on these servers
• Comprehensive REST API for easy integration with third-party tooling and programmatic access