Opscode (http://www.opscode.com) , Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced the launch of its Open Training program in which it will make all of its enterprise training materials freely available to users of Chef (http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Home) , the popular open source systems integration framework developed by Opscode. With today's announcement, the Opscode "Chef Fundamentals" class will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License. The class is being made available free of charge to partners and customers who are interested in providing specialized Opscode training. Chef users are invited to request a copy of the training materials here: http://info.opscode.com/opentraining (http://info.opscode.com/opentraining) .
"Cloud infrastructure should be more like today's modern electrical infrastructure. Just like anyone can build an electrical circuit so should anyone be able to build cloud environments," said Randy Bias, CEO of Cloudscaling (http://www.cloudscaling.com) , a cloud computing consultancy based in the Bay Area. "Opscode's Chef enables incredible agility by treating cloud infrastructure as code. Now, with Open Training, they have taken it one step further. The code to build the code is available under an open license for anyone to reuse. This is the only way to drive greater value and help destroy the walled gardens epitomized by much of the cloud community."
Opscode's technology enables companies of all sizes to build, scale, and manage world-class, fully automated infrastructures based on community best practices and expertise. In 2009, Opscode released "Chef," an open source systems integration framework. Since this time, more than 150 individuals and 25 companies including Rackspace (http://www.rackspace.com) , RightScale (http://www.rightscale.com) and the Springsource division of VMware (http://www.vmware.com) have signed on to contribute to the project, making it the world's largest open source configuration management project based on the number of contributors. Using Chef, software developers and engineers are able to manage large-scale server and application deployments by writing code, rather than running commands by hand. Chef is currently in production at top websites, including 37Signals (http://www.37signals.com) , Etsy (http://www.etsy.com) , IGN Entertainment (http://corp.ign.com/about) , Scribd (http://www.scribd.com) , Wikia (http://www.wikia.com) , and White Pages (http://www.whitepages.com) .
"This latest offering from Opscode's Training, Services and Evangelism (TSE) group is being made available for free under creative commons license because we believe that the ability to build world-class, fully automated infrastructure should be made available to everyone," said John Willis, Vice President of the TSE group for Opscode. "As someone who has literally trained thousands of individuals, I understand just how critical it is to create a robust training ecosystem. We want to help foster a large and vibrant community of Chef experts and this Open Training program is the first of many steps we're taking to help bring this vision to light."
About OpscodeOpscode provides world-class infrastructure automation for servers, datacenters, desktops, and the cloud. Opscode makes Chef, the open source configuration management and integration framework used by thousands of organizations to manage and scale infrastructure. Founded in 2008, Opscode's management team includes experts responsible for creating and operating some of the world's largest websites and cloud computing platforms. The company is privately held and headquartered in Seattle. More information can be found at www.opscode.com/ (http://www.opscode.com/)
