Facebook has deployed Opscode’s Private Chef, a software product based on the open-source IT infrastructure management tool called Chef. The social network uses the product to manage the web-tier infrastructure in its data centers, Opscode announced.

"There are three dimensions of scale we generally look at for infrastructure: the number of servers, the volume of different configurations across those systems, and the number of people required to maintain those configurations," Phil Dibowitz, production engineer at Facebook, said. "Opscode Private Chef provided an automation solution flexible enough to bend to our scale dynamics without requiring us to change our workflow.”

Private Chef provided support, early access to upcoming changes and other features on top of the functionality the open-source Chef software provides, Dibowitz added. “Private Chef's basis on open-source Chef also aligns with our own open philosophy allowing us to contribute back to the greater Chef community."

Facebook has also joined with Opscode to deliver Opscode Chef 11, the latest release of the open-source solution Opscode announced Monday. Facebook played a role in field-testing this open-source code base and also helped to speed its delivery to market, according to Opscode.

Facebook’s “use of Private Chef to automate and manage this large-scale infrastructure illustrates the power of Chef in solving some of the most critical and complicated IT challenges on the planet," Adam Jacob, chief customer officer at Opscode, said.

Corrected: An earlier version of this article erroneously said Facebook was planning to use Opscode's software. Facebook is using it in production now, which the article has been altered to reflect. DatacenterDynamics FOCUS regrets the error.