I found no contact or company information on their website, except 2 email adresses. I can't verify if this is just a clever way of mass deploying a stealth botnet or something.
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.
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.)
"Long Nguyen has nearly 10 years experience as an enterprise build and software configuration management consultant and remembers having to install his first Linux server from floppy images that were downloaded using a 14.4K modem in his Harvard dorm.
Long has a PhD in Physics from The University of Chicago and got a crash course in the world of startups as part of the YC W08 session."
I found no contact or company information on their website, except 2 email adresses. I can't verify if this is just a clever way of mass deploying a stealth botnet or something.
Will you trust them?