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Highly Available Solution for Chef Products

Organizations across the industry are running Chef Infrastructure Management or Chef Compliance products on critical systems to ensure high uptime and resilience by having bespoke deployments of Chef Software components in HA topology. The Highly Available solution will be available out of the box with enterprise-grade reliability to meet the flexible demands of scaling, resiliency, and reliability of underlying infrastructure.

Chef Automate “High Availability” (HA) is a high available solution for Chef enterprise workloads that provides a redundant, scalable solution of Chef Automate, enabling higher scalability, resilience, and recovery of critical systems in case of failures.

This capability will be an alternative solution for previous HA solutions including - versions implemented by Professional Services, and Chef Backend. It will be available as a part of the Chef Automate package in June 2022. Using the Chef Automate HA topology can help:

  • Maintain high uptime of systems configured with Chef Infra
  • Manage security postures of large-scale infrastructure & cloud resources with Chef Compliance
  • Simplify the installation and deployment process of critical systems
  • Migrate from legacy Chef high availability solutions to Automate HA
  • Deploy out of the box HA solution on cloud and on-prem infrastructure

High Availability and Automate HA

At Chef, we see high availability, scalability, and resilience as three critical attributes necessary to securely maintain enterprise infrastructure.  The new version of Chef Automate adds critical redundancy support by providing a scale-out, clustered storage tier in an easy-to-implement deployment pattern.

HA clusters are servers that are grouped together to operate as single, unified systems supporting server applications that can be upgraded with minimal downtime.

Once released, Chef Automate HA documentation will include:

  • Simplified installation guide for HA reference architecture
  • Description of features and operations such as backups, subsequent version upgrades, and data restoration
  • Migration paths and supporting scripts
  • Performance tests and scaling guidance to help identify possible tuning and cost optimizations

Who can use the HA features?

All existing customers will be able to download, install, and configure Automate HA either as a clean, new installation (no prior versions), as an alternative to Chef backend installations, or as migrations from previous HA installations. Release documentation will cover migrations from non-HA versions of Automate (standard), Chef-backend installations, and previous versions of Automate HA implemented by professional services.

How do I get Automate HA?

Automate HA will be available as a feature within the standard Automate package for licensed users. Specific versions on the download site which include Automate HA will be shared during the release in June.

When will it be available?

Chef Automate HA  will be available for download with Automate package from June 2022 which can be downloaded from this page ( https://downloads.chef.io).

If you are interested in preview access or have questions about migrations or support, fill in this form or reach out to [email protected] or [email protected].

Questions?

Please reach out to us on our Community Slack channel, #automate2_0

Enterprise Customers can also reach out to their respective Customer Architects and Support Team.

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Karunesh Kumar

Karunesh is the Engineering Manager at Progress Chef. He is part of the Automate High Availability team.

Ankur Mundhra

Ankur Mundhra is a Senior Product Manager at Progress Chef.