Ancestry.com helps millions discover, share and preserve their family history through hundreds of unique components on its website. Using Private Chef® from Opscode, Ancestry.com can rapidly improve its time to market for new components and gain operational efficiencies and cost savings.

u The Challenge

Ancestry.com is the world’s largest online family history

resource, with 1.8 million subscribers worldwide. To best serve

its customers, Ancestry.com leverages thousands of servers

across multiple data centers, all supporting a truly service-

oriented architecture with intense management demands.

Since Ancestry.com’s business continues to grow so rapidly,

the management demands of its infrastructure can outpace

its operations team’s resources, necessitating the move to an

infrastructure automation platform.

u The Solution

Ancestry.com deployed Opscode Private Chef® across its

large-scale IT infrastructure to enable automated configuration

management and continuous component delivery. With Private

Chef, Ancestry.com is seeking a robust infrastructure automation

engine installed behind their firewall. This enables more efficient

collaboration between development and operations teams

in continuously deploying new applications into production.

Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com can now bring new services to

market in days, versus the weeks it took previously.

LOCATION : Provo, UT

INDUSTRY : Consumer Internet Services

INFRASTRUCTURE : Datacenter

u The Results

• Bring new services to

market more rapidly.

• Automated server

configuration

management and

environment creation

with a few simple

clicks, enabling agile

development and

efficient operations.

• Automated application

deployment using

Private Chef.

• Adapt to changes on the

fly leveraging Private

Chef’s configuration

management database.

CASE STUDY : Opscode + Ancestry.com

CLOUD RULES #76:

Family stories are like applications. New ones are created everyday.

Since starting as a publishing

company in 1983, Ancestry.com

has grown into the largest online

family history resource, combining

billions of digitized historical

records with proprietary online

search technologies and tools to

enable its subscribers to make

meaningful discoveries about the

lives of their ancestors. To power

its one-of-a-kind research platform,

Ancestry.com employs thousands

of primarily Windows-based servers

across multiple data centers to

enable the development, testing and

delivery of its many sophisticated

subscriber services. An infrastructure

of this scale requires time-intensive,

demanding management, something

that eventually became cumbersome

for the company’s operations team.

“We believe Private Chef can make

life much easier for our developers

and operations staff as they work

to build, test and implement new

features and applications,” said

John Esser, Director of Engineering

Productivity and Agile Development

at Ancestry.com. “Private Chef helps

our IT teams to more easily deploy

new offerings and rapidly scale

applications so our subscribers can

trace their family roots by accessing

the billions of genealogical records

and millions of family trees from

around the globe.”

Leveraging Opscode’s customer

support and services, Ancestry.com

installed Private Chef behind the

firewall in its physical infrastructure.

Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com has

begun automating the configuration

management of its entire

infrastructure, which has the ability

to significantly reduce management

overhead and lay the foundation for

continuous application delivery.

“Automating configuration

management enables us to easily

move applications through all our

environments — from build to

integration, to pre-production and

finally production — with testing

taking place at every stage,” Esser

added. “Now a new component

can be introduced and eventually

published in a seamless, continuous

cycle, saving time and reducing risk.”

Using Private Chef, Ancestry.com has

been able to abstract infrastructure

changes to basic data files, enabling

its development team to quickly

update the files and feed them

into Private Chef, which creates

recipes based on these files and

executes the changes automatically.

For example, if a new component

requires an updated version of .NET

or Java, the development team

inputs this information into Private

Chef, which then automates the

update from the build environment

all the way to production, ensuring

robust testing and analysis

throughout the process.

In addition to configuration

management and continuous

application delivery, Ancestry.com

also uses Private Chef to obtain

greater visibility into its infrastructure.

Private Chef collects and stores data

on server settings and changes,

resource usage, applications and

other related information, creating a

configuration management database

that provides Ancestry.com with

highly accurate and granular detail

on its infrastructure. Using this data,

Ancestry.com’s development and

operations teams can be much more

prescriptive in executing change and

better utilize existing resources in

bringing new services to market.

CASE STUDY : Opscode + Ancestry.com

“With Private Chef, we’ve began executing an agile development strategy, significantly accelerating the rate at which we can bring new, sophisticated services to our subscribers. Now we have the ability to make better use of our infrastructure and are more prepared for whatever changes tomorrow may bring.”

u�John Esser, Director of Engineering Productivity and Agile Development, Ancestry.com

u About Opscode

Opscode is the leader in cloud infrastructure automation. We help companies of all sizes develop fully automated server infrastructures that scale easily and predictably; can be quickly rebuilt in any environment, and save developers and systems engineers’ time and money. Opscode’s team is comprised of web infrastructure experts responsible for building and operating some of the world’s largest websites and cloud computing platforms. Opscode is headquartered in Seattle.

More information can be found at:

opscode.com

1008 Western Avenue Suite 600

Seattle, WA 98104

PH: 206.682.7928