So we’ve built some first-generation integration between Chef and BladeLogic 8.5, which we’re demoing in our booth for the first time here at ChefConf. You can use BladeLogic to call Chef cookbooks and recipes on a push/scheduled basis, and you can reference BladeLogic compliance policies from inside your Chef cookbooks. It’s all very early and not production-ready, but we want to put this integration front and center with the people here at ChefConf and start a conversation about how they want to blend these two approaches to a stable, managed IT infrastructure.
BladeLogic plays an interesting role in the history of the Puppet/Chef/etc. automation world. As I recall, Puppet’s founder Luke Kanies worked on Blade for a short while and, you know, was interested in a better way, which eventually led to Puppet. Also, for those who like startup culture books, Blade was the chief rival of Opsware, where many of the stories in The Hard Thing About Hard Things come from.