---
title: Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Animates Server Chef
description: The Register profiled my move from Amazon's Master of Disaster role to co-founding Opscode and launching Chef, tracing the line from reliability engineering to infrastructure as code.
doc_version: "1.0"
last_updated: 2010-01-26
slug: ex-amazon-master-of-disaster-animates-server-chef-register
outlet: The Register
author: Andrew Orlowski
date: 2010-01-26
url: https://www.theregister.com/2010/01/26/opscode_automation/
type: Article
excerpt: The Register profiled my move from Amazon's Master of Disaster role to co-founding Opscode and launching Chef, tracing the line from reliability engineering to infrastructure as code.
tags:
  - DevOps
  - Infrastructure as Code
  - Chef
  - Cloud Infrastructure
  - Chaos Engineering
  - Site Reliability Engineering
  - Open Source
---

The Register profiled my move from Amazon to Opscode under the headline "Ex-Amazon 'Master of Disaster' Animates Server Chef." The article introduced the "Master of Disaster" framing to a global technology audience and connected it to Chef, the open-source infrastructure automation framework we had just launched.

At Amazon, my title was Master of Disaster and my job was website availability across every property bearing the Amazon name. The practice we built for that work was GameDay: schedule failure on purpose, run the drill, expose the latent defects, do it again. That same orientation shaped Chef. Instead of configuring servers one at a time, engineers wrote "recipes" that programmatically configured and managed fleets of servers across cloud providers like Amazon EC2 and in private data centers. The Register called it "object-oriented programming for system administrators."

Adam Jacob and I co-founded Opscode with Nathan Haneysmith and Barry Steinglass, betting that infrastructure could be versioned, tested, and deployed like application code. Chef grew to serve Apple, Facebook, Google, and IBM, among many others, before Progress Software acquired the company in 2020.

## Also Mentioned

- Jesse Robbins (person)
- Opscode (company)
- [Chef](https://www.chef.io) (product)
- [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com) (company)

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