Cloudy Journey: Chef Announcements: Lighting the Path from Here to There

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Chef Announcements: Lighting the Path from Here to There
// Chef Blog

Technology shifts, such as the moves toward cloud-native applications and container-first architectures, make it clear that tomorrow will look very different from today. But how to get from here to there? Today Chef announced a host of new product features, partner offerings, and skill-building opportunities that, taken together, light a path for enterprises to follow.

At Chef, we're helping our customers on their journey to continuous automation, developing the ability to deliver software at speed, with efficiency and low risk. Chef's continuous automation platform, Chef Automate, helps teams build, deploy, manage, and collaborate across all aspects of software production: infrastructure, applications, and compliance. The organizations we see adopting this approach are simplifying and providing consistency to their software delivery regardless of the environment or shape of application.

Three themes in today's announcement offer guidance to those who are ready to move faster on their continuous automation journeys: continuous compliance, application-centric operations, and skill building.

Continuous compliance is necessary to deliver at speed

As applications deconstruct into microservices, development teams deliver more quickly but risk multiplying security vulnerabilities just as quickly. What's needed is an approach that integrates information security into the software development lifecycle. With today's announcements, Chef makes compliance automation an integral part of the software deployment cycle, across any environment. Chef Automate now features extensive compliance automation capabilities, including powerful reporting features tailored to the different roles that must work together to deliver secure software. Additionally, InSpec can now test, interact with, and audit cloud platforms including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and VMWare vSphere. These capabilities give enterprises the tools they need to build security into software from the start, and help Information Security teams align with their DevOps counterparts. Organizations no longer have to make trade-offs between speed and security as they move to modern application architectures.

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Application-centric operations to support an application-centric world

As enterprises prioritize rapid software delivery, the stresses on DevOps teams reach well beyond security and compliance. Today, Chef announced a number of advancements to Habitat that make it easier for teams to build, deploy, and manage both modern and legacy applications across hybrid environments. The new Habitat Builder service helps ensure consistent packaging, so any application can run anywhere. The service helps organizations manage applications without worrying about underlying infrastructure and dependency complexity and change. To make application management even easier, Habitat now ships with an initial set of 20 Habitat plans for common enterprise application components, as well as scaffolding features for popular application languages and frameworks. With them, developers can quickly create Habitat packages. At ChefConf, Chef is previewing early work to integrate Habitat with Automate, further strengthening support for continuous automation.

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Focus on building skills to navigate change

Moving from here to there means people's skills must move from here to there as well. With Learn Chef Rally, Chef has created an experience designed to accelerate skill-building for all Chef practitioners, regardless of their starting point. Just as the DevOps movement is driven by practitioners who are always willing to learn new skills, so too does continuous compliance and an application-centric posture rely on skill development. Those organizations that gain expertise the fastest and align their teams accordingly will capture the largest share of the opportunities offered by a cloud-native, container-first world.