Opscode has announced their Commercial Platform is now available to the public

Opscode, Inc., a cloud infrastructure automation company, today announced the limited beta release of the Opscode Platform, the world’s first hosted configuration management service. The Opscode Platform makes the popular open-source configuration management tool Chef even more powerful and easy to use.

Chef is an open source project that allows administrators to write “recipes” and automate builds in a cloud environment. It can provision web servers all configured the same way, for example.

I was just watching an example of how efficient this can be when I noticed a typo in permissions that would create a weakness. This reminded me of the double-edged swords of administration. Although it’s fantastic to be able to deploy hundreds or thousands of servers with the click of a button, deploying hundred or thousands of insecure servers can create a real nightmare. Yet another example of how security in the cloud might look different to some.