SAP

As the growth of applications increases year over year, the most successful companies will be those that understand and enable the strategic role developers play in their organizations. In order to enable this success, Enterprise IT organizations must evolve their practices. Groups that provide a classic “Shared Services” model must reshape their goals, processes, and offerings to keep up with this growth. Traditional models focus on implementing risk mitigation and operational standards. A modern “Developer Services” model focuses on empowering and enabling developers to deliver ideas to market quickly.

Using Automation to Manage Complexity

SAP’s DevOps CoE began using Chef about two years ago. The CoE manages approximately 10,000 nodes, where about 70% of those machines are Windows servers. The group manages a variety of infrastructure types.

“We can build a simple single server, any type of OS, applications, development tools, and databases,” says Ran. “On the other hand, we can also build large, complex networks that we call landscapes. These [landscapes] can include any number of application servers, database servers, and web servers. We do this for hundreds of development teams and each team is different. We build solutions for teams with 10 members and for teams that have 500 members.”

Before Chef, the group used a wide variety of tools. Ran tells us, “We used any scripting language. We used bash, we used PowerShell, we used Python, every script that you can think about or is available. When we were introduced to Chef we slowly started to write the automation and switched to Chef for these deployments.” Chef introduced a common language with cross platform support and the flexibility to automate the most complex of use cases.