Today, Progress announced significant enhancements to the Chef portfolio during ChefConf ’21, being held online from September 7-9. These new features demonstrate Chef’s continued commitment to accelerating organizations’ DevOps journeys. Chef’s product development priorities are focused on improving security and compliance outcomes for our customers, creating a unified experience for the Chef practitioner, and making the Chef portfolio easy to adopt and use.
Today’s announcements fall within three categories:
Compliance and Multi-Cloud: Chef Compliance Automation for Cloud Resources is now available, with over 300 cloud resource packs spanning AWS, Azure, and GCP. This significantly expands the Chef Premium Content portfolio to help organizations audit and remediate their infrastructure and applications in accordance with CIS benchmarks and DISA STIGs. In addition, Chef now integrates with Azure Policy to enable adherence to Azure best practices.
Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) Enhancements for Operator Productivity: EAS is Chef’s full-stack offering, including Chef Infra, InSpec, Habitat, Automate, and Premium Content. This release continues to build upon Chef’s vision for an integrated automation platform. This release includes significant enhancements to Chef Infra Compliance Phase, which enables InSpec policies to be written and executed alongside infrastructure code as part of any Chef Infra Client run. New, more powerful infrastructure management dashboards allow multiple Chef Infra Servers and orgs to be added in order to view and update nodes, environments, roles, policyfiles, and more. Stronger test-driven development features have been built into Chef Workstation and Test Kitchen, making testing with Policyfiles and setup in CI pipelines easier. In addition, Chef has launched a beta secrets management integration for industry standard secrets management tools.
Deployment Flexibility: Chef Managed Services is a new offering to reduce the administrative effort and operational cost while increasing business value for customers who would like Chef to manage their Chef deployment. In addition, Chef software is now available via the AWS and Azure Marketplaces, providing a more convenient way to buy for cloud customers. And finally, we are very excited about our new Chef SaaS offering, which we are making available as a beta for a limited number of customers. This will give customers the option to consume Chef software as a cloud service.
Comprehensive compliance visibility and flexible waiver capability leveraging an extensive library of CIS certified Chef Premium Content
More powerful infrastructure management dashboards for greater control over the organization's environments
Over the past several years, Chef has put significant focus on building out security and compliance capabilities to make the DevSecOps concept achievable for our customers. Through a policy-as-code approach, and with significant new certified content available, Chef is helping organizations achieve success in their cloud security posture management (CSPM) projects. As Jay Thoden van Velzen from SAP mentioned in his remarks for ChefConf, “As our cloud workloads grow across cloud providers, our approach to security and compliance has to be flexible and highly scalable. Today we are scanning 14 million cloud resources for compliance in a matter of hours, and we anticipate that number will continue growing rapidly.”
To learn more about today’s announcements, access all ChefConf ’21 sessions here.
