DevOps continues to make inroads throughout the technology world. Software development companies benefit from the closer interaction between developers and network engineers while leveraging many of the latest industry innovations in virtualization and software containers. Even other industries, like financial services, enjoy the benefits of faster software delivery and more efficient technical operations.
One of the most popular tools used in the practice of DevOps is the open source IT automation framework known as Chef. It helps companies better manage their software infrastructure, facilitating the faster deployment of applications and the upgrades to servers and applications. Let’s take a closer look at how this tool makes your organization’s “DevOps Kitchen” run smoothly.
Chef leverages the concepts of “recipes” and “cookbooks” to define how a server’s applications and utilities are configured and maintained. A recipe defines everything from the services a node provides to its security policies. Essentially, these scripts serve to automate the development, configuration, and management of an IT infrastructure.
Cookbooks are collections of recipes focused on solving a specific problem. This modular approach to system configuration makes Chef an essential tool in the practice of DevOps, where flexibility and speed are paramount. The use of Ruby as a domain-specific language (DSL) for writing recipes offers additional flexibility and power to those familiar with that popular language.
The financial services industry is an example of a business sector able to benefit from DevOps and the use of Chef. Many of these companies rely on legacy mainframes for their daily operations, making the adoption of newer innovations like the Cloud, virtualization, and software containers a more difficult process. Chef facilitates the integration of mainframes into these more modern infrastructures.
One financial services company able to modernize their systems using Chef is the London-based, Barclays. The company uses a DevOps approach to automate many of their software processes, including patching and upgrading server operating systems. Notably, they no longer need to log into each server to perform these tasks.
“Our server builds went from 2-3 weeks to 3-4 hours,” commented Jonathan Custance, a VP of Automation Engineering at Barclays. The company also benefited from being able to easily visualize their entire server infrastructure, ensuring the current state of systems is accurate and up-to-date.
Many technical professionals familiar with Chef enjoy lucrative salaries and contract rates. In fact, the average yearly salary for a DevOps engineer with Chef skills is nearly $100,000, according to data from Payscale.com. Learning how to write recipes and cookbooks using this popular tool is a wise call for any IT professional.
Stay tuned to the Betica Blog for additional dispatches from the evolving world of software development. As always, thanks for reading!
Posted on July 7, 2017 | Categories News, Software Development | Tags Chef, DevOps, Software Development