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Comment by aaronbrethorst | Hacker News Reader

It looks like it's a good UI on top of Opscode's Chef platform. You choose your Chef recipes and run a script that downloads the Chef client and starts installing recipes.

So, it doesn't seem to be too good to be true, at least to me. My guess is that this is an MVP for a product designed to put a non-awful UI on top of Chef (Opscode's SaaS product is, imho, borderline unusable).

That said, there is a high bar here for trust, no doubt about it.

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Guess letting someone 3rd party install your server / compile your server from source requires a bit more than trust. IMHO this will be the key problem for professional /paying users. Those who would just use e.g. an AMI from a repository will certainly have no problem with that.

If you find a way to generate install scripts that can be inspected before those are run or the service is providing the scripts to be run from a local Chef server that might be an interesting approach.

FYI the recipes are all custom written. The community ones are aren't very standardized and usually are only good for installing from distribution packages.

(And if you look through the install output, you'll also see where they get stored on your server if you want to review anything that's being done.)

So I see. Again, this is very cool. I hope you are planning on turning this into a commercial product.

We're definitely looking into the right way to turn this into a commercial product...

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