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Awesome Chefs – Wanelo Delivers Huge Ruby on Rails App w/Enterprise Chef

Shopping online is nothing new. But our friends at Wanelo (pronounced “wah-NEE-lo” from want, need, love) have whipped up something awesome with an online platform uniting shoppers, products, and stores on a 100% member-driven community. In other words, Wanelo helps millions of people share and find dynamite products at cool stores for great prices. Try it yourself here.

Now, what Wanelo does is pretty sweet, but for all you in the Community, the most interesting thing may very well be how they do it. Wanelo uses Joyent as the foundation of for its Ruby on Rails-based application, which is one of world’s largest at peaks of 200,000 requests per minute. That’s some serious action. Of course, with the company focused on delivering new app updates on a nearly continuous basis to meet customer demand, making sure its cloud infrastructure keeps up is a top priority.

How? Surprise, surprise, they went with Enterprise Chef.

With only one dedicated operations professional and a couple of full stack engineers, Wanelo needed to automate config management for all its Joyent servers, while also empowering dev teams to access, build, and manage their own resources.

Of course, as many of you have experienced, development and operations are not traditionally aligned to attain hyper-speed. Here’s what Konstantin Gredeskoul, CTO at Wanelo, had to say:

“Development wants to push change, but operations is traditionally responsible for minimizing change to production, so these groups have different priorities. As we rolled out Joyent and the business took off, we knew we’d need to avoid such friction to be successful.”

So, Wanelo used Enterprise Chef to give development a shared blueprint of code for configuring Joyent servers across development, test, and production – eliminating the need for dedicated operations staff. Instead, a handful of engineers bridge both development and operations roles, making development teams more self-reliant. Using Chef, developers can deploy additional resources they need on-demand, since the code for doing so is shared, tested, and approved by all stakeholders. In addition, using code to execute infrastructure changes enables Wanelo to be more flexible and adaptive in responding to user traffic fluctuations.

Very cool.

To read the whole story on Wanelo’s cloud infrastructure strategy and success with Chef, check out the case study here and/or the press release below.

Wanelo Builds Online Community for All the World’s Shopping with Opscode

Opscode Enterprise Chef™ Deployed to Automate Joyent Infrastructure and Enable DevOps Culture to Drive Extreme Development Velocity

SEATTLE – September 9, 2013 – Opscode®, the foundation for the coded business, today announced that Wanelo, the only online community 100 percent focused on products, has automated its entire Joyent cloud infrastructure with Opscode Enterprise Chef™. Using Enterprise Chef, Wanelo has automated configuration management across development, test, and production environments for one of the world’s largest Ruby on Rails applications, increasing development velocity and improving system resiliency.

Wanelo (pronounced “wah-NEE-lo” from want, need, love) is an online community for all the world’s shopping,bringing together stores, products and people in a single social platform. The company uses Joyent as the foundation of for its application – which can receive as many as 200,000 requests per minute – providing extremely high-performance and scalability to support millions of daily visitors. To empower its developers to move at the speed of its customers’ needs, Wanelo deployed the hosted version of Enterprise Chef to automate configuration management for its entire Joyent infrastructure.

“Chef has helped us reach new levels of speed and efficiency. With Joyent already in place, Chef plugged right in seamlessly,” said Konstantin Gredeskoul, CTO, Wanelo. “We now have a common code blueprint that dev teams share, so we’re all operating from the same playbook with real-time collaboration.”

“The Netflix’s and Amazon’s of the world showed us a different way to deliver value to customers via the Internet and mobile devices. Wanelo is following in this tradition, while also doing something truly unique in its member-driven shopping community,” said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. “Using Chef to create a DevOps-minded culture means they can keep pushing the bounds of innovation in delivering an awesome online shopping experience.

Wanelo used Enterprise Chef to give development a shared blueprint of code for configuring Joyent infrastructure. Now, development is more self-reliant and can deploy additional resources they need on-demand, since the code for doing so is shared, tested, and approved by all stakeholders. By using code to execute changes to infrastructure Wanelo is more flexible and adaptive in supporting development speed and user traffic fluctuations.

For detailed information on the results Wanelo achieved with Enterprise Chef, please read the case study here.

Lucas Welch

Former Chef Employee