Chef Automate 2 – A Modern Platform for Continuous Automation

We are delighted to announce the general availability of Chef Automate 2, a major upgrade to our continuous automation platform. Chef Automate 2 is the culmination of a nine month re-architecture initiative to improve performance, scale and responsiveness. A refreshed UI allows you to see all infrastructure and compliance events in one interface and most importantly, isolate & debug failures. Building on the new capabilities in InSpec 2, we’ve enhanced the compliance features in Chef Automate to bring in cloud and network device scanning and made it easier to manage custom profiles. Finally, a true platform API in Chef Automate 2 allows fine-grained data access control and makes possible new integrations with our many partners including ServiceNow, Splunk, Google Cloud Platform, HP Enterprise, and others joining us this week in Chicago.

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Enhanced operational visibility and debugging

Chef Automate 2 provides new tools and visualizations to help users gain the actionable insights they need to detect and correct problems faster. A streaming event feed displays every action taken and helps identify issues. Improved querying capabilities allow for easier and more insightful drill-down into infrastructure and compliance events to uncover the source of problems.

Compliance scanning and reporting in any environment

Since last year’s ChefConf, Chef Automate has added significant compliance capabilities to detect and report on issues covering a wide range of environments, compliance benchmarks, and use cases. Chef Automate 2 continues that trend to extend to the cloud and network devices by taking advantage of the latest innovations in InSpec. Chef Automate 2 supports compliance scanning and reporting in AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform environments, as well as against Cisco IOS network devices. This helps organizations take advantage of a single platform to test and secure their entire fleet.

Re-architected for speed and flexibility

Our customers put Chef Automate to the test in demanding, large scale, mission critical environments every day. Over the past year our engineering team has worked closely with customers to ensure Chef Automate meets their demands and is ready to take on the next set of challenges headed this way, including automating fleet sizes of tens of thousands of nodes. Chef Automate 2 features a modern UI built on top of an API-driven microservices architecture, which allows for dramatically faster performance, scale, and true integration points for customers and partners.

Moving forward

Take Chef Automate for a trial by visiting https://automate.chef.io. Current Chef Automate customers can take advantage of in-place upgrades with automatic data migration from Chef Automate 1.x. For more information, please visit: https://automate.chef.io/docs/upgrade.

Dan Hauenstein

Dan was the Vice President of Product Marketing at Chef, helping companies understand Chef so they can achieve speed and outpace the competition. He spent 20 years in strategy, marketing, and enablement roles in the enterprise software space at companies including Hortonworks, IBM, Micromuse, and McKinsey & Co. Throughout his career he’s tried to make complicated subjects easy to understand, mainly by boiling them down to three bullet points.