Harnessing the Cloud with AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate

For the past 8 years, Stephen Figgins, System Administrator for University of Kansas Agile Technology Solutions, has been a Chef practitioner and valued member of the vibrant Chef community.

At ChefConf 2018, Stephen had a conversation on the main stage with Nathan Harvey, our VP of Community Development. Stephen talked about his journey with the Chef community and his success with automation. You can watch a recording of the presentation below.

From Open Source Chef to OpsWorks for Chef Automate

For many years, University of Kansas used Open Source Chef for deployment and updates but were eager to take advantage of the premium features of Chef Automate. Similar to many other organizations, they have recently undergone a physical to virtual shift followed by a cloud migration to Amazon Web Services.

The move to AWS provided Stephen a great opportunity to take advantage of AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate, as it provides an easy way to get started, is bundled as part of their AWS services, and is easy to consume with their existing AWS account.

Success with AWS & Chef

With OpsWorks for Chef Automate, Stephen’s team can auto scale groups seamlessly and faster, disaster recovery got a lot easier, and development groups are now looking to further speed up the bootstrapping process.

They are now exploring ways to expand their usage of Chef Automate by leveraging InSpec for continuous compliance of student and medical data instead of periodic auditing, and Habitat for application automation to better enable developers on their apps teams.

Get started with AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate

It’s easy to get started with AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate. Follow AWS’s console walkthrough to deploy your Chef server in a few clicks. Get started for free!

Gershon Diner

Gershon is a Director of Business Development at Chef Software, and much of his focus is on penetrating and scaling or partnership with the leading cloud partners. Gershon has over 20 years of leadership experience in engineering, sales, Biz Dev and strategic alliances, in startups and OSS communities. He is a customer-obsessed and implemented many successful products for the most recognizable enterprise global brands. Gershon moved from Israel to Palo Alto, CA with his family to enjoy the outdoors, the people, innovation, vibe and the buzz in the heart of the Silicon Valley.