For the $$ questions I strongly advise you talk to your sales rep. We will make it simple for you and your scenario. It's great to see real world concepts and we are working to align how you work with how we price. I'm confident we can work something out - no need to try to solve it on your own.
As for the build release process, no - we are not releasing the release engineering pipeline work. But since I'm confident we can get to constructive, affordable commercial relationship with you this shouldn't matter.
"All Chef’s software is mission critical and runs in a variety of different use cases and environments. As a result, we have not implemented hard enforcement and we don’t have any plans to change that. What we do have are commercial terms that we expect users of the software to honor. Users will have to accept the terms of the Chef End User License when they first run our software. Once the license acceptance has been acknowledged, acceptance can be automated to avoid the need for user input for further deployments. "
Correct - Essentials is just a low cost suite of Chef products. We offer two suites,. Effortless Infrastructure, focused on core config mgmt and security/compliance use cases and Enterprise Automation Stack which includes all of that plus a wide range of app automation capabilities including dependency mgmt, lifecycle mgmt, etc.
@antoncohen - We will provide easily installable downloads for non-commercial, experimentation, and individual use which should make getting started with Chef just as easy today as it was yesterday.
Today we have two easy methods for getting Chef's bits.
1) www.chef.io/get-chef/ - which is intended for newer users where we collect contact information so we can help with customer success.
2) downloads.chef.io which provides all of our downloads, ungated, for advanced users.
We have an email address on the landing page for folks like you -- [email protected] -- ping us, send us details, we'll get you over and take care of you. It's really more for recommending the intermediaries but it's a way to contact us -- so take the initiative :) The sentiment here is largely correct -- accelerators, VC's and others provide a great way to prevent fraud and other issues that programs like these deal with. We also offer $500 credit vouchers for folks who want to tinker and we are working on other ways (stay tuned) for people who want to evaluate for free to do so.
We could get into and endless debate about SLA's, their meaning, and their value. I don't think our bar for GA and the SLA are correlated. nknighthb's interpretation is correct. The bar has to do with a wide variety of other factors including our commitment to the business, how we are focusing on customer support, view of go to market and investments there, technical aspects like performance consistency, data throughput, peering, private backbones, encryption at rest, hardware, and so many other layers. We could have just said "GA" in May at IO when we also had an SLA of 99.95% but the SLA isn't even close to enough. It's just a factor and definitely not the most important one.
I know that's the historical wisdom but we are working very and investing heavily to make sure that isn't true in general, and specifically for Cloud Platform. We've scaled our support team dramatically to support the influx of paid support with GA and are working hand-in-hand with lots of customers everyday. It's obviously never perfect, but I can assure you it's important to us and we are doing everything we can to make the experience with support as good as we can.
regular maintenance helps with reliability because we do a lot of work proactively with power, hvac, switches, etc. which reduces likelihood of failure. Being able to perform maintenance in general is generally good for the stability of our system.
We actually have come a long way in Support and now offer affordable paid support options and some very high end packages for mission critical operations. Check out https://cloud.google.com/support/packages where we have the details.
For the $$ questions I strongly advise you talk to your sales rep. We will make it simple for you and your scenario. It's great to see real world concepts and we are working to align how you work with how we price. I'm confident we can work something out - no need to try to solve it on your own.
As for the build release process, no - we are not releasing the release engineering pipeline work. But since I'm confident we can get to constructive, affordable commercial relationship with you this shouldn't matter.