Chef begins new era of DevOps

 Chef’s workflow automation product Chef Delivery, initially made available as an invitation-only program in April, is now generally available and integrates with the new Chef Compliance offering. Together, they automate infrastructure, runtime environments, applications and compliance policies. These new products provide a proven process for managing complex, end-to-end changes and enable enterprises to deliver value through software faster and with maximum safety.

 

Chef’s new compliance capabilities enable users to automate the assessment and remediation of IT infrastructure. Chef Compliance is built on technology from VulcanoSec, a security software company based in Germany, which Chef recently acquired. Chef is integrating Chef Compliance with Chef Delivery to bring compliance into the DevOps workflow.

 

“As organisations in all industries rapidly evolve their business models around technology, they are struggling to develop software at velocity, while also meeting complex compliance and security obligations,” said Barry Crist, CEO of Chef.  "Chef Delivery and our new compliance capabilities provide a demonstrated DevOps workflow for enterprises that want both speed and security."

 

"DevOps is how we do things at Ooyala. We're building out Chef Delivery to be the foundation for our workflow, so our engineering team has a single pipeline to drive our development,” commented Caedman Oakley, DevOps evangelist, Ooyala. "A great example of how we'll use Delivery is as the pipeline for building, testing, and deploying our open source Docker management framework, Atlantis, enabling the team to best collaborate on a core piece of our production environment."          

 

“We share a fierce belief that open technologies propel our clients forward. The proven DevOps pipeline and infrastructure automation features of Chef Delivery are allowing us to do just that,” said Nirmal Mehta, Senior Lead Technologist, Strategic Innovation Group, Booz Allen Hamilton.

 

The current compliance landscape includes increasingly detailed requirements. For organisations in highly regulated sectors, such as healthcare, financial services and government, detailed compliance impedes the ability to innovate. However, by specifying compliance requirements as code, verification tasks that were previously manual and reactive can be embedded as tests in an automated workflow. Together, Chef Delivery and Chef Compliance automate the analysis, specification, testing, and certification of infrastructure and enable enterprises to more easily apply regulatory requirements at any scale.

 

Product Highlights

Following Chef’s recent Series E funding round, the company is investing in research and development to enable IT, security, and business teams to best collaborate on delivering innovation safely and at velocity. By releasing Chef Delivery and bringing VulcanoSec’s audit technology to the Chef platform, Chef now provides:

 

?      Comprehensive Compliance Coverage: Using VulcanoSec’s innovative technology, Chef Compliance includes compliance profiles - audit rules in the form of code - to validate that a production node is properly configured. Any necessary remediation can then be systematically applied with Chef’s automation framework.

?      Powerful Audit Framework: Chef Compliance users can collaborate on, version, and deploy policy as code within a software development pipeline, fully integrating compliance into high-velocity software delivery. Because the tests are automated, they can be applied repeatedly to ensure even minor changes won't break any compliance rules.

?      Unified Workflow: Chef is integrating its new compliance functionality, as well as its sophisticated reporting feature, Chef Analytics, with Chef Delivery, providing a shared pipeline and proven workflow for software development that quickly and safely takes code from a developer’s or operations engineer’s workstation through build, test and production.

 

To enable enterprises to attain the skills and cultural patterns necessary to successfully adopt DevOps, Chef has introduced a new Enterprise Transformation practice that offers executive training and ongoing coaching for organisational change. The new practice is led by Chef Vice President and Chief Architect, Justin Arbuckle, who led GE Capital’s DevOps initiative three years ago and has replicated this success for organisations such as Standard Bank since joining Chef in 2013. Consulting engagements are available to all organisations and are priced and tailored to fit each company’s individual needs.