CLOUD RULES #76: Family stories are like applications. New ... · collaboration between development...
Transcript of CLOUD RULES #76: Family stories are like applications. New ... · collaboration between development...
Ancestry.com helps millions discover, share and preserve their family history through hundreds of unique components on its website. Using Private Chef® from Opscode, Ancestry.com can rapidly improve its time to market for new components and gain operational efficiencies and cost savings.
u The Challenge
Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online family history
resource, with 1.8 million subscribers worldwide. To best serve
its customers, Ancestry.com leverages thousands of servers
across multiple data centers, all supporting a truly service-
oriented architecture with intense management demands.
Since Ancestry.com’s business continues to grow so rapidly,
the management demands of its infrastructure can outpace
its operations team’s resources, necessitating the move to an
infrastructure automation platform.
u The Solution
Ancestry.com deployed Opscode Private Chef® across its
large-scale IT infrastructure to enable automated configuration
management and continuous component delivery. With Private
Chef, Ancestry.com is seeking a robust infrastructure automation
engine installed behind their firewall. This enables more efficient
collaboration between development and operations teams
in continuously deploying new applications into production.
Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com can now bring new services to
market in days, versus the weeks it took previously.
LOCATION : Provo, UT
INDUSTRY : Consumer Internet Services
INFRASTRUCTURE : Datacenter
u The Results
• Bring new services to
market more rapidly.
• Automated server
configuration
management and
environment creation
with a few simple
clicks, enabling agile
development and
efficient operations.
• Automated application
deployment using
Private Chef.
• Adapt to changes on the
fly leveraging Private
Chef’s configuration
management database.
CASE STUDY : Opscode + Ancestry.com
CLOUD RULES #76:
Family stories are like applications. New ones are created everyday.
Since starting as a publishing
company in 1983, Ancestry.com
has grown into the largest online
family history resource, combining
billions of digitized historical
records with proprietary online
search technologies and tools to
enable its subscribers to make
meaningful discoveries about the
lives of their ancestors. To power
its one-of-a-kind research platform,
Ancestry.com employs thousands
of primarily Windows-based servers
across multiple data centers to
enable the development, testing and
delivery of its many sophisticated
subscriber services. An infrastructure
of this scale requires time-intensive,
demanding management, something
that eventually became cumbersome
for the company’s operations team.
“We believe Private Chef can make
life much easier for our developers
and operations staff as they work
to build, test and implement new
features and applications,” said
John Esser, Director of Engineering
Productivity and Agile Development
at Ancestry.com. “Private Chef helps
our IT teams to more easily deploy
new offerings and rapidly scale
applications so our subscribers can
trace their family roots by accessing
the billions of genealogical records
and millions of family trees from
around the globe.”
Leveraging Opscode’s customer
support and services, Ancestry.com
installed Private Chef behind the
firewall in its physical infrastructure.
Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com has
begun automating the configuration
management of its entire
infrastructure, which has the ability
to significantly reduce management
overhead and lay the foundation for
continuous application delivery.
“Automating configuration
management enables us to easily
move applications through all our
environments — from build to
integration, to pre-production and
finally production — with testing
taking place at every stage,” Esser
added. “Now a new component
can be introduced and eventually
published in a seamless, continuous
cycle, saving time and reducing risk.”
Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com has
been able to abstract infrastructure
changes to basic data files, enabling
its development team to quickly
update the files and feed them
into Private Chef, which creates
recipes based on these files and
executes the changes automatically.
For example, if a new component
requires an updated version of .NET
or Java, the development team
inputs this information into Private
Chef, which then automates the
update from the build environment
all the way to production, ensuring
robust testing and analysis
throughout the process.
In addition to configuration
management and continuous
application delivery, Ancestry.com
also uses Private Chef to obtain
greater visibility into its infrastructure.
Private Chef collects and stores data
on server settings and changes,
resource usage, applications and
other related information, creating a
configuration management database
that provides Ancestry.com with
highly accurate and granular detail
on its infrastructure. Using this data,
Ancestry.com’s development and
operations teams can be much more
prescriptive in executing change and
better utilize existing resources in
bringing new services to market.
CASE STUDY : Opscode + Ancestry.com
“With Private Chef, we’ve began executing an agile development strategy, significantly accelerating the rate at which we can bring new, sophisticated services to our subscribers. Now we have the ability to make better use of our infrastructure and are more prepared for whatever changes tomorrow may bring.”
u�John Esser, Director of Engineering Productivity and Agile Development, Ancestry.com
u About Opscode
Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment, and save developers and systems engineers’ time and money. Opscode’s team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world’s largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle.
More information can be found at:
opscode.com
1008 Western Avenue Suite 600
Seattle, WA 98104
PH: 206.682.7928