During Chef Summit last year Chris Brown and myself committed to releasing the Erlang API server,

aka “erchef”, under a open source license by the end of summer 2012. I’m very proud and happy to

announce we’re in the final stages of making the release happen. This is the culmination of a huge effort by both of Opscode’s engineering teams.

erchef has been built from the ground up to work with MySQL and Postgres. CouchDB is a fine data store but doesn’t really fit Chef’s usage patterns. We believe replacing CouchDB with support for two popular open source relational databases will improve performance and ultimately simplify installing and using Chef.

erchef will be the API server in Chef 11. As with any large and potentially disruptive change, we wanted to give folks a chance to take a look at the new code and play with erchef before the release. To date, we’ve opened a significant amount of the new codebase under the Apache2 license:

This week we are working to put the finishing touches on the remaining server code and build process. When we’re done we’ll open the remaining three repos along with instructions on how to build erchef. We’ll also share preview Omnibus installers to simplify setting up a erchef-based Chef server.

Afterwards we’ll begin the release process for Chef 11 and erchef’s official debut. We’re excited to share these improvements with our users and continue to make Chef even better!

Please see these resources for detailed information about erchef: