Delivering on Continuous Automation with Chef, InSpec, and Habitat

Today we are delighted to be recognized in the Leaders category of new ‘The Forrester Wave™: Configuration Management Software for Infrastructure Automation, Q4 2017’ report. To take a detailed look at the report, you can grab a copy from this link – enjoy the read!

The Forrester Wave™: Configuration Management Software for Infrastructure Automation, Q4 2017
The Forrester Wave™: Configuration Management Software for Infrastructure Automation, Q4 2017

Both Chef and Chef Automate, our OSS and Commercial products, are named as Leaders in the report among a competitive set of 14 Configuration Management vendors. While being delighted with the position, it also confirms for us the feedback that we hear from our customers that Chef is a crucial part of their Continuous Automation efforts. For a great example of this, check out our recent profile of NIU’s journey.

The Forrester analysts call out both the strengths of Chef’s community as well as our technology. “The strengths of open source Chef include the breadth of system support as well as community engagement,” write authors Chris Gardner and Robert Stroud in the report, which gave Chef  the highest score possible of 5 in the community support criterion. “[Chef] Automate excels at deployment support, monitoring and governance, and community support.”

Chef has always provided huge scope of capabilities for DevOps and automation and Chef Automate delivers on the scale capabilities to enable management of significant, and complex, infrastructure.

If you want to try Chef Automate, then we have a Quick Start here, or a download here. It’s also pre-installed on AWS Marketplace and Azure Marketplace. Additionally, OpsWorks for Chef Automate is a fully managed service of Chef Automate on AWS.

From Configuration Management to Continuous Automation

Most recently, we’ve been talking about ‘Continuous Automation’ (get the white paper) which is our way of expressing what means to embrace all aspects of automation: from infrastructure, to compliance, to application automation.  Ultimately, automation is not simply about ‘configuration’ but about delivering software at speed, with high efficiency, and minimum risk.

In particular, Compliance Automation is becoming an extremely hot topic — find out more about our approach to that here, and how we help compliance ‘shift left’ into DevOps through compliance as code via InSpec.

Detect, Correct, and Automate

Another core promise we make to our customers is delivering solutions for any environment. Every enterprise has a mixed portfolio: from existing on-premises datacenters comprised of VMs and bare metal, to new cloud native and container-first architectures.

The common denominator in all of these scenarios is the need for Continuous Automation, and a simple and consistent way to do that. Our investments in Chef, InSpec, and Habitat address these needs holistically, enabling consistent build, deploy, and manage processes across any portfolio and mode: from cloud to on-premises, bare metal to containers, and infrastructure-centric to application-centric development and operations.

Delivering Software at Speed

All of these investments and use cases and customer challenges are in pursuit of delivering software at speed: the essential notion of getting from ‘idea’ to ‘ship’ as effectively as possible to stay ahead as digital transformation dominates the growth of every industry.

Quantifying outcomes to deliver software at speed
We’re always excited about recognition such as that in this report, but even more, we’re excited to solve real enterprise problems for real customers. Tell us how we can help you.

Marc Holmes

Former Chef employee.