Chef Software, Inc. was an American corporation headquartered in

Seattle, Washington Seattle ( ) is a port, seaport city on the West Coast of the United States. It is the county seat, seat of King County, Washington, King County, Washington (state), Washington. With a 2020 population of 737,015, it is the largest city in bo ...

, which produced configuration management software. It was acquired in 2020 and merged to become

Progress Chef Progress Chef (formerly Chef) is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration "recipes". Chef is used to streamline the task of configuring ...

History

The company was founded as Opscode in 2008 by current Chief Technology Officer Adam Jacob,

Jesse Robbins Jesse Robbins is an American technology entrepreneur, investor, and firefighter notable for his pioneering work in Cloud computing, role in creating DevOps/Chaos Engineering, and efforts to improve emergency management. Career Robbins is a v ...

, Barry Steinglass, and Nathan Haneysmith. Chef is based in Seattle, with regional offices in

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdo ...

and

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

. In Sep 2015, Chef Chef was valued at $360 million after a $40 million venture capital funding round. In November 2015, the company acquired a German security startup, VulcanoSec. In 2019, it was discovered by a journalist that

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the United States from the cross-border crime and illegal immigration tha ...

was paying Chef approximately $95,000 per year for a software license. At that time, a former Chef employee deleted his code repository in protest of the contract. The company did not announce any changes to its contracting processes or partners. In September 2020, the company announced that it was being purchased by

Progress Software Progress Software Corporation (Progress) is an American public company that offers software for creating and deploying business applications. Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts with offices in 16 countries, the company posted revenues ...

with an intended final date in October. A press release gave the price of acquisition at $220 million. The merged company was named

Products and Licensing

Chef offered a single commercial product, Chef Automate, released at ChefConf in July 2016. Chef Automate includes a full-stack continuous deployment pipeline, and automated testing for compliance and security. Chef Automate builds on two of Chef's open source projects - Chef and InSpec - and integrates with the company's third open source project, Habitat. Habitat offers "application automation" to simplify running complex applications in different environments including containers, traditional data servers, or PaaS. Chef offered three versions of its product: Chef Basics (free, open source), Hosted Chef ($72/node, minimum 20 node purchase), and Chef Automate ($137/node, annual subscription).

References

External links

*{{Official website Software companies based in Washington (state) Software companies of the United States