Case Study: Facebook achieves massive-scale systems configuration automation with Chef

Using Chef to automate systems configuration at massive scale

Facebook’s infrastructure team was running into the limits of their legacy cfengine2 setup as their environment grew to many clusters with more than 10,000 nodes, a high volume of constantly changing configurations, and small operations teams. Integrations with internal systems were difficult, testing and configuration isolation were impractical, and one-off changes stopped scaling—making management increasingly complex and error-prone.

After evaluating options, Facebook built a system on Chef that let a very small team manage thousands of servers with diverse, evolving configurations using code. Chef’s flexibility and support gave them scalable automation across the number of servers, variety of configurations, and staffing needs, improved workflow and testing, and aligned with Facebook’s open-source practices so they could both benefit from and contribute back to the community.

Facebook

Phil Dibowitz

Production Engineer