Our integration with Chef automation has always been a crucial element of Flexiant Concerto. Concerto templates, which can be deployed and autoscaled on any public cloud, are powered by Chef cookbooks. We have examined in previous blogs just how Concerto makes it simple to make the most out of Chef, e.g. Chef Made Easy, How to simplify the interconnection of Chef roles and Chef Simplified: Helpful Tips for Removing Complexity. Chef had a great year in 2015 – let’s a look at what they’ve achieved over those 12 months.
April saw another successful ChefConf, with over 1,500 participants in attendance. Customers and partners speaking at the conference included Amazon, The Walt Disney Company, Etsy, Facebook, GE Capital and Yahoo.
A key announcement made at this event was Chef’s brand new Partner Certification program, which “brings together a unique set of long-standing technology leaders and new IT innovators in providing both the tools and skills needed to achieve high-velocity software development and IT operations,” as Ken Cheney (VP Business Development at Chef) put it. Early important signups to this program included Accenture and Rackspace.
Another significant partnership announcement was with Canonical. Not only did Chef add support for Canonical’s Machine as a Service offering, but Chef is now packaged in the Ubuntu distribution with Level 1 and Level 2 support.
Another highlight of ChefConf was the live demonstration of Chef Delivery, a software platform and DevOps-driven workflow for the continuous delivery of infrastructure, runtime environments and applications.
The same month also had Chef enjoy phenomenal Year-over-Year growth: 192% for incremental recurring revenue and over 200% average revenue per new customer. Their commercial software customer base grew to more than 700, while their automation platform has been downloaded over 16 million times, over twice as much as the year before.
August saw the launch of the integration between Chef and IBM zSystems mainframes at LinuxCon. In the words of Matt Ray, Director of Partner Integration at Chef: “We’re experiencing rapid and accelerating adoption of Chef within the enterprise, making integration with IBM z Systems an important feature for our platform. We’re excited to collaborate with IBM on their support for open source technology and to ensure an awesome Chef and IBM user experience for years to come.”
2015 was also a great year for Chef in terms of funding. In September they closed a hefty $40 million of Series E funding. This investment is allowing Chef to expand its global operations as well as to generally step up product development in response to increasing DevOps customer demand.
To see for yourself how Flexiant lets you harness the power of Chef easily and onto any cloud, sign up here for free.
