1. Automation for Education
Building an Empowered IT Organization
May 2013

2. Automation for Education
A discussion on Chef and empowering IT in higher education
Sanjay Modi
Technical Director
The Wharton School @ U Penn
Bryan Hale
VP, Online Services
Opscode
Chris McClimans
Solution Architect @ Opscode
Fmr IT Director, Texas Tech U

3. Agenda
• Challenges Facing Higher Ed IT
• Introduction to Chef
• Case Study – Wharton’s Empowered IT Team
• Q&A

4. 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
1980
Mainframe
1990
Client/Server
2000
Datacenter
2010+
Cloud
Scale x Complexity > Skills

5. 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…

6. 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!!!

7. 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:

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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”

11. 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.

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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.”

18. 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…

19. Q&A