Chef and Canonical Partner to Integrate and Distribute Chef With Ubuntu 

Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced a partnership today to integrate and distribute Chef with Ubuntu. Canonical is integrating the Chef automation platform with Canonical's Machine-As-A-Service (MAAS), enabling users to automate the provisioning, configuration and deployment of bare metal compute resources in the data center. Canonical is packaging Chef 12 server in upcoming distributions of its Ubuntu open source operating system and will provide commercial support for Chef within its user base.

Chef CEO Barry Crist and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth will be presenting the companies' partnership and future plans together during a keynote at ChefConf 2015, on Wednesday, April 1, at 4:15 pm PT, which can be viewed via live stream.

Automated Bare-Metal Provisioning: Leveraging Chef and Canonical's MAAS, users can rapidly deploy bare metal machines with a choice of Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, SuSE and even Windows, either in the data center or as part of a private or hybrid cloud implementation. This integration gives users the ability to optimize machine configurations and workloads for different scenarios with full transparency. With MAAS and Chef, private infrastructure becomes as easy to provision as public cloud resources.

Ubuntu Distribution of Chef: Canonical will distribute Chef 12 with future versions of Ubuntu, combining the best in open source automation and operating systems for quickly building and managing public or private cloud environments.

Canonical Support for Chef: As part of the packaged Chef and Ubuntu distribution, Canonical will provide Tier One and Tier Two support for all Chef deployments within its user base.

"Every business needs to spend fewer calories on IT management and are looking to automation and cloud-ready platforms to do so. Combining Chef's scale and flexibility with Ubuntu's tremendous Linux platform empowers users to easily manage everything from bare metal servers to large-scale clouds," said Barry Crist, CEO, Chef.

"Chef and Ubuntu are often inseparable in serious server deployments, making mutual integration a must for our users. We're excited to offer Chef as part of the Ubuntu distribution and to deliver easy bare metal provisioning with MAAS and Chef," said Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical.