CHEFCONF 2019 – Chef today announced a number of significant
enhancements to its recently-introduced
Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) that make it easier for customers
to deliver and secure infrastructure and applications in any
environment. New capabilities include the introduction of comprehensive
Application Operations Dashboards, new Migration Accelerators and
seamless management of Chef Infra and Chef InSpec using Chef Habitat.
These new innovations were unveiled at ChefConf
2019, being held in Seattle from May 20-23.
“Enterprise cloud migration challenges have shifted away from
configuration management and simple infrastructure provisioning to
include a wide variety of issues based on co-dependent variables that
cross team boundaries and require seamless execution across
widely-distributed areas of expertise,” said Jim Mercer, Research
Director at IDC. “To fully exploit the capabilities of the cloud,
enterprises need to continuously address the end-to-end application
workflow, from compliance assessment to application dependencies and
cross-platform management.”
The enhanced Chef EAS provides a unified stack to enable the Coded
Enterprise, integrating automation engines for infrastructure,
security and applications and providing a clearly-defined mechanism for
collaboration through code. By offering full-stack observability for
operations staff, EAS reduces interdepartmental friction and unifies
cross-disciplinary teams, increasing velocity and reducing risk.
Chef Automate Application Operations Dashboard
Enterprise operations teams have traditionally lacked the visibility
they need to take the actions necessary to ensure applications move
quickly and remain healthy and secure over their lifetimes. In addition,
they lack detailed visibility into security and compliance status,
making audits more time consuming and exposing the enterprise to
unacceptable risk. Chef Application Operations Dashboards give them
end-to-end visibility of the application lifecycle and simplify
infrastructure troubleshooting and application health.
These new dashboards give operations teams comprehensive and
customizable visibility into the health of services that make up the
application. They also provide powerful filtering and reporting, giving
users the ability to see how individual security and compliance controls
are performing across a heterogeneous estate, simplifying compliance
reporting. In addition, new Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform
integrations build on existing AWS capabilities to provide expanded
visibility across cloud providers, enabling teams to scan cloud nodes
and APIs for complete compliance reporting across heterogeneous,
multi-cloud estates.
Chef EAS Migration Accelerator
Moving legacy applications to the cloud has failed to pay off for
enterprises for two reasons. First, applications are tightly dependent
on underlying infrastructure platforms, so many migration efforts fail
before they get started. Second, ‘lift & shift’ efforts move existing
technical debt and related issues (difficult/slow to update,
security/compliance gaps) into the cloud without solving the underlying
problems. Chef’s new EAS Migration Accelerator makes it easier than ever
to re-platform legacy applications to the cloud. While sometimes a
nice-to-have or an optimization exercise, this is especially critical
when essential core platforms, such as Windows Server 2008, are facing end-of-support.
The EAS Migration Accelerator for Windows scans existing .NET
applications running on IIS to discover configuration and dependency
details, then packages this information as code. It significantly
reduces the time required to build application packages in Chef Habitat,
defining application lifecycle dependencies as code to free the
applications from their legacy infrastructure platforms and enabling
teams to move them to any modern platform, including AWS, Microsoft
Azure and Google Cloud Platform.
Effortless Infrastructure, Delivered
Configuring and securing heterogeneous infrastructure at scale is
difficult. With the power of infrastructure-as-code come the challenges
of skills, complexity and manageability. Full-lifecycle management of
Chef Infra and Chef InSpec using Chef Habitat simplifies deployment,
management and upgrades, both on-premises and in the cloud.
The newest versions of Chef Infra and Chef InSpec take advantage of Chef
Habitat lifecycle management technology, making it easier than ever to
deploy, update and manage the entire Enterprise Automation Stack in any
environment. Pre-configured compliance profiles and hardening cookbooks
simplify users’ ability to customize and modify which security and
compliance controls are tested for and enforced, allowing them to turn
controls on and off based on enterprise-specific needs without having to
write or modify code. This significantly reduces the skills required and
the time it takes to tailor infrastructure hardening and testing to
unique requirements.
Additional Enterprise Enhancements
In addition to the enhancement above, Chef is introducing new
high-availability clustering, providing highly-available data stores and
API services for Chef Automate deployments at any scale (100k+ nodes).
New Chef professional services maintenance plans also help enterprises
integrate with disaster recovery systems.
“We came to market with a new vision for Chef and its users in April of
this year when we announced that we were making all of our software open
source and that we would unify our products as the Chef Enterprise
Automation Stack,” said Chef CEO Barry Crist. “Today’s announcement
marks the first strong step in the delivery of that vision, taking a
holistic approach to enterprise application health through automation
and increasing our commitment to deliver on collaboration through code.
I am very proud of what we have been able to achieve since the last
ChefConf. I look forward to continuing to drive the company and working
closely with our community toward realization of our shared vision for
DevOps-driven transformation.”
About Chef
Chef is the leader in DevOps, driving collaboration through code to
automate infrastructure, security, compliance and applications. Chef
provides a single path to production making it faster and safer to add
value to applications and meet the demands of the customer. Deployed
broadly in production by the Global 5000 and used by more than half of
the Fortune 500, Chef develops 100 percent of its software as open
source under the Apache 2.0 license with no restrictions on its use. Chef
Enterprise Automation Stack™, a commercial distribution, is
developed solely from that open source code and unifies security,
compliance, infrastructure and application automation with
observability. Chef provides an unequaled developer experience for the
Coded Enterprise by enabling users to express infrastructure, security
policies and the application lifecycle as code, modernizing development,
packaging and delivery of any application to any platform. For more
information, visit http://chef.io
and follow @chef.
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