Opscode Webinar: Automation for Education May 08-2013

Automation for EducationBuilding an Empowered IT Organization

May 2013

Automation for Education

A discussion on Chef and empowering IT in higher education

Sanjay ModiTechnical Director

The Wharton School @ U Penn

Bryan HaleVP, Online Services

Opscode

Chris McClimansSolution Architect @ OpscodeFmr IT Director, Texas Tech U

Agenda

•Challenges Facing Higher Ed IT

•Introduction to Chef

•Case Study – Wharton’s Empowered IT Team

•Q&A

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 20151980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989

Virtual Nodes

Physical Hardware

Unprecedented IT Complexity

1980Mainframe

1990Client/Server

2000Datacenter

2010+Cloud

Scale x Complexity > Skills

Education IT Challenges

1. Do more with less. Manage an increasing (and increasingly complex) set of environments, systems and applications

2. Become empowered. Say yes to new projects such as online initiatives, public and private cloud adoption etc

Today, University technology teams are being required to…

Education IT Challenges

1. Do more with less. Manage an increasing (and increasingly complex) set of environments, systems and applications

2. Become empowered. Say yes to new projects such as online initiatives, public and private cloud adoption etc

Today, University technology teams are being required to…

…and still deliver first class services with high availability!!!

Opscode is the Company Behind Chef

Recipes and Cookbooks that describe and deliver code.

Chef enables people to easily build & manage complex & dynamic applications at massive scale

•Configuration management

•Cloud management

•Continuous delivery

Chef is a software delivery platform for developers & systems engineers to continuously define, build, and manage infrastructure.

CHEF USES:

“”

Community Overview

The Chef Community

25,000+ Community Members

900+ Community Cookbooks

250,000+ Cookbook Downloads

400+ Public Training Attendees in the last year

30 Local User Groups

Over 200 Corporate Contributors

How Chef Works

1. Workstation, from which Chef users build and apply configurations

2. Chef Server – Stores infrastructure-wide data and distributes cookbooks

3. Chef Clients – Subscribe to configurations, enforce desired state

Chef Provides a Model for Reuse That Works

900+Cookbooks

“Yesterday we started open sourcing some of our Opscode Chef work created at bestbuy.com; bit.ly/yDV9Hl #Splunk #opschef”

Two Chef Use Cases for Education IT

1. Configuration Management. Automatically build and manage servers -- from internal ERP systems, to DNS, email, web applications, research environments etc

2. Cloud Management. Harness the scale and responsiveness of your public or private cloud environments. Build/re-build across clouds.

1. Configuration Management

• Assign roles to new servers and let Chef take care of the rest

• Chef’s discovery agent indexes environment data in real-time and makes it available for search

• Manage Windows, Linux, Solaris from the same set of re-usable infrastructure cookbooks

“Chef automates complex tasks that are otherwise time and resource intensive, but more importantly it allows us to focus our efforts on innovating and improving the quality of our services”

Sanjay Modi, Technical Director at Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Manage and Automate Complex IT Infrastructure

2. Cloud Management

Pre-built integrations for…

To deliver such a multi-faceted service, our infrastructure needs to be able to adapt at a moment's notice. Amazon EC2 gives us the resources we need, but to ensure consistency and maximum flexibility, we had to automate with Chef.

Ashley Streb, Vice President of Technology at Brightcove

Manage and Scale Public, Private, and Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure

Provision, Configure and Deploy From Chef

Background

Challenge

Solution

“”

Chef Case Study - Marshall University

• Marshall University is West Virginia’s second largest public university. It employs a modest IT staff to manage all of the institution’s computer services.

• Managing a complex mixed infrastructure with a need to quickly automate and simplify management of its systems

• Increase agility and reliability to efficiently manage platform configuration

• Marshall University selected Chef to provide it with significant infrastructure automation, configuration management, speed, IT agility and systems recovery

• Deploying Chef dramatically reduced the team’s systems management time, allowing them to concentrate on innovating with confidence that its infrastructure was running smoothly.

From bare metal to a fully configured system,

deployment with Chef only took 15 minutes,

instead of weeks or months if we were to build it

by hand.

-Eric Wolfe, Senior Linux Administrator

Background

Challenge

Solution

“”

Chef Case Study - University of Minnesota

• One of the nation’s largest schools, the University of Minnesota supports the tech needs of 20,000 students with five IT admins

• Supporting more than 300 servers and 200TB of storage with a small team that needs to ensure that servers are continually configured, monitored and managed

• Streamlining configuration management and creating a scalable model for continued growth

• With Chef, the university now has a robust infrastructure automation engine that makes it easy for the College’s IT team to configure, replicate and provision servers or entire environments

• The College can now manage its infrastructure with a few simple lines of code, eliminating the risk of human error and ensuring resource consistency for student-facing applications

• Enable model of reuse for continued growth, including an additional 100 servers

Hosted Chef has made it easy to configure once,

then replicate many times over, saving us

significant amounts of time.

-Kemal Badur, Research Computing &

Engineering Coordinator

Chef Case Study – The Wharton School

Background

• Founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania is recognized globally for intellectual leadership and ongoing innovation.

• Wharton’s technology team focused on Chef across three functional areas

1. Core IT Services

2. Wharton Research Data Services

3. Knowledge @ Wharton

Chef Case Study – The Wharton School

• Team of operations engineers maintaining hundreds of servers primarily for “core services”

• The manual effort required to maintain this legacy infrastructure starved new initiatives…

Challenge

Prior to working with Opscode Chef…

“One major reason for the difficulty of managing innovation is the complexity of managing the resource allocation process…those (initiatives) given lower priority, whether formally or de facto, will starve for lack of resources and have little chance of success.”

Chef Case Study – The Wharton School

1. Apply automated configuration management to core IT services free up resources for innovation

2. Utilize public IaaS for new initiatives quicker time to market, lower up front cost

3. Apply devops practices to dev/test environments prototype new services rapidly

Solution

Empowering an IT organization in three steps…

Q&A