Chef has announced some major additions to their lineup today. We will look at each of these but in total here is the news from Chef today:
First of all the previously announced Chef Delivery is now in GA for everyone. Chef Delivery defines and manages the entire DevOps workflow. The diagram below is a good illustration of this:
According to Chef, Delivery, “provides a prescriptive process to automate changes to infrastructure, applications and containers in a single prescribed pipeline.”
Beyond the general availability of the previously announced Delivery, Chef also announced that they are moving into services in a big way. They are spinning up a new DevOps transformation practice to help enterprises adopt DevOps and transform their models. Justin Arbuckle, chief enterprise architect at Chef is heading up this new practice. I would assume they will compete with professional service organizations like IBM, HP, PWC and others in helping large enterprises transform and adopt DevOps practices. It is a natural move for Chef as it continues to mature along with the DevOps market in general.
Finally, Chef is going to roll out compliance as code, part of something Justin Arbuckle has spoken to me before of compliance at velocity. In order to bring this capability to market Chef has bought a smaller German security provider called VulcanoSec. VulcanoSec has done a good job of developing a shift-left security product that allows for continuous compliance. I am sure we will see the Chef team expand this as they seek to bring more and more security into the DevOps process and they see opportunity for improving the entire development/deployment environment to make it more secure. They will also have to integrate and work with existing enterprise security solutions.
All in all this is quite a series of announcements from Chef, which were made at the European Chef Community Summit in London. Chef has been a leader of the DevOps movement from the very start and they continue to show that they will continue to lead and innovate in bringing DevOps and everything as code to enterprises everywhere.
