Managing server and application configuration on Linux and Unix boxes during the past several years has gotten easier thanks to open source tools like Chef and Puppet. Now Opscode, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Chef project, is bringing the benefits of Chef to Windows users.
The Chef system enables administrators to leverage ‘recipes’ that define configuration for automated deployments.
“Our early community and our early adopter were much like us, so we developed our system all around deployment and monitoring on Linux and Unix,” Christopher Brown, chief technology officer at Opscode, told InternetNews.com.
When it comes to getting Chef up and running on Windows, Opscode is bundling the open source Ruby language in with the installed.
“We have an all-in-one installer, since we recognize that Windows folks expect a higher level of polish for an installer,” Brown said. “Getting Ruby and some of the other required dependencies is not always straightforward, that’s why the all-in-one installer is necessary.”
The addition of Windows support isn’t changing the development approach for Chef either. Brown said that there is one version of Chef for Windows and Linux. He explained that the backend of Chef is basically a publishing platform that doesn’t really care what system the bits are running on.
“The bits that are specific happen in the recipes,” Brown said. “People will write recipes that will only work on Linux or Windows, but that’s not a difference in the Chef backend.”
