DEVOPSdigest

Chef announced new capabilities to enable enterprises to transition to cloud-native and container-first environments with consistent automation and DevOps practices.

As enterprises navigate major technology shifts, demand is higher than ever for simple and consistent automation and management across hybrid infrastructure and application portfolios. Chef continues to invest in its platform to ensure successful business outcomes from digital transformation efforts amongst its customers.

Chef Automate, the company's flagship Continuous Automation Platform, is being extended with capabilities for:

● Compliance Automation. Chef Automate now integrates directly with InSpec to provide consistent workflows and practices for validating security requirements and compliance controls. Defining compliance as code enables security requirements to ‘shift left’ into DevOps processes, enabling teams to deliver software with increased speed, improved efficiency, and decreased risk.

● Application Automation. Chef also demonstrated the future of Chef Automate’s integration with Habitat to extend to enterprises the application supervisor capabilities required for deploying and managing any application from legacy monoliths to container-based, cloud-native, microservices, and everything in between.

InSpec, the company’s compliance automation framework, released InSpec-AWS, InSpec-Azure, and InSpec-vSphere as incubation projects that bring compliance as code to the cloud. These projects provide resources to test, interact, and audit these cloud platforms directly and easily access their configuration inside of InSpec.

Habitat, the company’s emerging application supervisor technology, today released its highly anticipated Builder service for packaging, managing, and running apps. Habitat is focused on offering teams and enterprises the fastest and easiest way to package, build, and manage apps from bare metal through virtual and container runtimes. Habitat announced new productivity capabilities, including:

● Habitat Scaffolding. New helper functions in Habitat provide scaffolding to enable rapid packaging of apps built in with popular languages and frameworks such as Ruby on Rails and Node.js with more to follow. Packaged apps can then be exported to any target runtime such as Docker and ACI for use in container environments such as Kubernetes, OpenShift and Mesosphere DC/OS.

● Enterprise-ready Habitat Plans. An initial set of 20 core build plans to enable developers and teams to more quickly package applications for common enterprise scenarios. These cover Big Data (Cassandra, Spark, Storm, Kafka, Zookeeper, CrateDB), Monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), Middleware (WebSphere, Mulesoft, Varnish, RabbitMQ, Consul), Databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Shield backup) and Developer and Content Tools (Jenkins, Drupal, Wordpress).

● Core Package Auto-Rebuilds. Packages accepted and curated as ‘Core’ will be automatically rebuilt as their dependencies are updated. Users can then consume these to power their own applications.