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Tag: Chef Automate

  • Chef Extends Automation Reach and Scope

    Chef Extends Automation Reach and Scope

    At its ChefConf 2019 conference today, Chef extended its core platform in ways that collectively serve to automate further the management of applications and the IT infrastructure they are deployed on.

    Extensions to the Chef Enterprise Automation (EAS) Stack include the addition of Application Operations Dashboards, Migration Accelerators for moving applications to the cloud and tighter integration between the Chef Infra and Chef InSpec modules within the Chef Habitat management framework.

    Brian Goldfarb, chief marketing officer for Chef, said these latest additions to Chef Enterprise Automation Stack are part of an ongoing Chef initiative to make it easier to seamlessly unify the management of infrastructure and applications in keeping with best DevOps practices, which Chef refers to as the “Coded Enterprise.”

    Chef DashboardAs part of that effort, Chef Application Operations Dashboards provide visibility into both applications and infrastructure to simplify troubleshooting and compliance, said Goldfarb. For example, IT teams will be able to see how individual security and compliance controls are performing across a heterogeneous computing environment that now includes Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), he said.

     

    At the same time, Chef is trying to make it easier to lift and shift applications to the cloud. EAS Migration Accelerators automate an application migration process that today requires most organizations to spend considerable time and effort to accomplish manually, said Goldfarb.

    An EAS Migration Accelerator for Windows, for example, will scan existing .NET applications running on IIS to discover configuration and dependency details and then package that information as code. That approach significantly reduces the time required to build application packages in Chef Habitat.

    Within Chef Habitat, the integration between Chef Infra, for automating infrastructure configuration, and Chef InSpec, a tool for automation compliance, is now more unified via pre-configured compliance profiles and cookbooks that make it easier to customize and modify which security and compliance controls are tested and enforced.

    Finally, Chef has also added support for high availability to the EAS platform to make sure the environment is always accessible.

    Goldfarb said the goal is to continue to make automation more accessible to IT generalists versus requiring them to hire and train dedicated specialists. One of the primary reasons that DevOps practices have been adopted so unevenly within IT organizations is the bar to master them has been set too high. By making it easier to automate the management of both infrastructure and applications, Chef is moving to lower that bar and make it easier to manage IT by unifying the management of applications and infrastructure, said Goldfarb.

    It’s too early to say to what degree IT automation will advance the adoption of DevOps. What is apparent is that IT environments are becoming too complex for mere mortal IT administrators to manage manually. IT organizations are also expected to be able to respond faster to any issues that arise, which requires IT teams to have a unified view of applications and the infrastructure o which they are deployed. In fact, as IT organizations continue down that IT automation path, many of them one day may discover they have embraced DevOps without even realizing it.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Unnatural DevOps Delivers Supernatural Results

    Unnatural DevOps Delivers Supernatural Results

    DevOps is not necessarily a “natural” process. Asking people to function outside of their comfort zones and prescribed roles is a challenging task for any organization, and requires a shift in organizational behavior. At Trace3, we believe that while DevOps is not natural, a supernatural result is achievable with the right cultural transformation supported by good tools that drive collaboration and automated flow between people and tools in the application delivery workflow.

    We define DevOps as the application of the principles of continuous flow, feedback and improvement to people, process and technology for increasing agility, stability, security, efficiency, quality and satisfaction. Or, to quote from Michael Schmidt’s article, “Ten ways DevOps will benefit your IT department“: “When implemented properly, DevOps can transform your software engineering process and create value for both employees and customers, producing business performance and value.” These are huge “supernatural” benefits that every business would like to achieve.

    Implementing DevOps properly is challenging. DevOps depends on collaboration; smooth process flow from conception through deployment; and feedback between people, processes and technologies. It’s more natural for people and departments to hoard information and centralize control—traits that are contrary to DevOps best practices. People tend to trust their own abilities and are skeptical when they need to trust dependencies on others. People view competition with others as a means to personal advancement. Compounding this, organizations often manage, measure and reward success at the silo level instead of recognizing a successful delivery as a result of successful execution across the end-to-end DevOps value stream.

    Breaking down silos through transparency and the free exchange of information helps organizations implement the unnatural DevOps processes needed to achieve supernatural results. Fortunately, the transformation is assisted with technology. For example, continuous automation tools liberate sharing of infrastructure, application and compliance information. Pauly Comtois, Hearst’s vice president of DevOps, describes the role of strong tooling in successful DevOps transformations in his article, “Enterprise DevOps at Hearst Digital Media“: “Tools can be an incredible asset in this regard. We deploy Chef across multiple teams in the value stream, automating the deployment, configuration and state of environments in Dev, QA and Production.”

    In scenarios such as the example above, tools support integrated and automated processes for builds, configuration, infrastructure and deployment management. Information managed by continuous automation tools is available for DevOps uses by providing a single “public yet controlled” source of truth for configuration data useful by all processes and tools in the toolchain across the end-to-end pipeline. Those who were concerned and hoarded configuration data can trust that the tools will keep the information secure, reliable and available on demand as readily accessible code.

    Moving beyond the natural behavior of organizations and individuals is difficult, but success can create supernatural results for long-term growth and team effectiveness.

    — Marc Hornbeek

  • Chef Applies IT Automation to Meet Compliance Mandates

    Chef Applies IT Automation to Meet Compliance Mandates

    Much of the productivity waste associated with compliance requirements stems from the fact that most developers and IT operations teams aren’t aware how an application might be non-compliant until it’s too late. Aiming to eliminate that fundamentally inefficient approach to meeting compliance mandates, Chef this week tightened the integration between its Automate continuous automation platform and InSpec, an open-source project lead by Chef for specifying compliance and security policies.

    At the same time, Chef enhanced support for Docker within InSpec and released InSpec-AWS, InSpec-Azure and InSpec-vSphere as incubation projects that IT operations teams can employ to test and audit for compliance. Chef also pledged to extend InSpec beyond operating systems to include support for middleware to address compliance issues across an entire platform. The announcements were made at the ChefConf 2017 conference.

    Chef CEO says Barry Crist says that in much the same way Chef automation software turns infrastructure into code, InSpec turns compliance into code. Tighter integration between the two platforms should enable IT operations teams to automate compliance testing before code gets deployed in a production environment. In effect, Crist says, compliance becomes just another continuous process automated by Chef. This approach not only leads to faster application deployments, it also reduces the amount of time auditors must spend checking on where production applications comply with a particular mandate, as all the documentation has already been generated.

    Compliance mandates are, in many ways, the enemy of innovation. In fact, it often takes longer these days to navigate compliance issues than it does to write a piece of code. Rewriting code to comply with multiple compliance requirements over several different manual tests is a waste of time and money. InSpec makes it possible to make compliance testing a part of an integrated DevOps process in much the same way security testing is fueling DevSecOps.

    As the number of platforms that IT operations teams now need to support has expanded, the compliance testing process has become even more complicated. Crist notes that for DevOps to be truly effective, it needs to encompass not just the deployment of code but also making it possible to make compliance and security testing an integrated component of the application deployment process. Of course, as an open-source project there’s no reason developers can’t incorporate InSpec into any continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) framework they choose. Chef is just moving to make InSpec a more natural extension of its IT automation framework.

    There’s a lot of commonality in the controls implemented across various compliance specifications. That creates opportunity to automate controls to reduce the need to rework an application, either before it gets deployed or, worse, after it has been deployed into production. Longer-term, the level of commonality across compliance controls also creates an opportunity to leverage machine-learning algorithms to automate implementing those controls.

    Of course, there will also be controls that will be unique to one compliance standard or another. But the days when IT organizations need to manually address those compliance controls one application at a time are coming to an end.

    — Mike Vizard