ACADEMIA

Opscode announced that Digital Science, a technology company that works to change the way science is done through better use of technology, has deployed Opscode Hosted Chef to automate its Amazon EC2 infrastructure, including configuration and environment management, reporting and continuous application delivery.

Digital Science is a new technology company that both creates software and tools internally, as well as incubates and invests in other scientific startups with the aim being to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of research. For its infrastructure, Digital Science uses Amazon EC2 cloud resources to speed development processes and ensure maximum scalability in meeting market demand.

"At Digital Science, our aim is to enable better, faster and simpler research practices that can help speed scientific discovery," said Steven Mohapi-Banks, CTO, Digital Science. "Hosted Chef has given us the freedom to innovate without management overhead, making us more agile and responsive to continuing changes in scientific research practices."

“Digital Science is pioneering a unique, much-needed approach to better, more efficient science," said Adam Jacob, Chief Customer Officer, Opscode. "By using Hosted Chef to accelerate its application development and make the most of cloud computing, Digital Science is proving it has what it takes to deliver improved scientific processes in the future."

Using Hosted Chef, Digital Science's infrastructure team has created an integrated development pipeline in which all stages of the process are automated and continuous. Digital Science combined Hosted Chef with its own, internally developed server orchestration tool Baton, as well as Jenkins CI to achieve continuous code development, testing, staging and delivery for a wide range of sophisticated scientific applications. In addition, Hosted Chef provides complete documentation of Digital Science's entire infrastructure, enabling a model for reuse in deploying infrastructure as code to eliminate nearly all manual management.

Customer Benefits:

• Continuous Application Delivery: Using Hosted Chef in combination with Baton and Jenkins CI, Digital Science can develop, test, stage and deploy new software at any time, rapidly accelerating the company's rate of innovation and enabling its developers to easily adapt to changes in software production cycles, customer demand or infrastructure.
• Complete Documentation: Hosted Chef provides Digital Science with a data history of its entire infrastructure, from past changes to current configurations. This code repository delivers a model for reuse enabling any team member to easily identify appropriate code and deploy as needed. In addition, access to current and historical code ensures full transparency across development and infrastructure teams, improving collaboration and operating inefficiency.
• Reduced Management: With Hosted Chef, Digital Science has been able to automate all resource configuration and provisioning, eliminating manual management and ensuring its infrastructure is repeatable and consistent.