Solution
Continuous Delivery Pipeline Automation Tools
Scale Continuous Delivery across all applications, change events and environments with Chef.
Continuous Delivery Tools for Every Team, Every Change, and Every Environment
Continuous Delivery (CD) is a set of capabilities that enables application and DevOps teams to get changes of all types into production quickly, safely and reliably. Through the use of pipelines, organizations can define a consistent path to production where changes can be peer reviewed, automatically tested, and audited as they make their way to production.
CD goes beyond application code changes automating not only the continuous integration of the software but also the delivery of infrastructure, supporting systems and requirements for running and maintaining the application. Successful Continuous Delivery requires not only the successful automated delivery of an application but also:
Proof that the change was successful and that the application is working as expected
All environments (Dev, Pre-Prod and Prod) are updated and remain in-sync
Deployment to any environment (on-prem, cloud, or edge) can be automated
Supporting tasks (provisioning, testing, auditing, etc.) are automated
Delivery of supporting tools and platforms are automated
Security and compliance concerns are addressed
How Chef Fits in Continuous Delivery Pipelines
Most organizations already have a source control, build server, and technology provisioning process. Chef doesn't replace these tools but makes them easier to manage, scale and validate. For example, tools like Jenkins require users to create and maintain individual pipelines for each application. Chef creates universal, compliant artifacts that can be consumed by any pipeline automation tool (Jenkins, Azure DevOps, Build kite, etc.), deployed to almost any environment (Windows, Linux, Docker, Cloud Platforms, Kubernetes, VMware, etc.) and validated in real-time.
Benefits to Chef’s Approach to Continuous Delivery
Drive Consistency Across Dev, Ops and Security Teams
Consistently and securely deliver across all teams, change events and environments.
Reduce Tool and Script Sprawl
Minimize the number of tools and custom scripts that need to be maintained.
Align Delivery Processes
Use the same process to package all apps and create a single app directory.
Stop the Accrual of Technical Debt
Replace manual runbooks with codified and searchable artifacts for all apps and dependencies.
A Consistent and Scalable Approach to Continuous Delivery
Chef enables IT teams to scale Continuous Delivery across applications and all change events by providing a consistent way to define, package and deliver applications, infrastructure and compliance policies into secure coded artifacts that can be consumed by any pipeline automation system. Best of all, Chef’s approach is technology and environment agnostic. Chef’s solution can be used across operating systems, development languages and run-time environments on-premises or in the cloud without any rewriting or refactoring. Chef helps teams define “everything” an application needs to be built, run and managed independent of any underlying infrastructure.
Chef’s Continuous Delivery Solution
Continuous Delivery at scale requires consistent patterns that are not tool- and platform-specific. Chef applies an “as code” approach to the entire technology stack to enable consistent delivery patterns when working with legacy, cloud-native and everything in between. Chef’s approach includes policy along with the release, and tests are run and errors are addressed at build time vs. run time. Each policy and dependency is defined as code, versioned, and stored in source control along with the application code. They travel the pipeline along with the application code, are updated and versioned along with the application and monitored in production.
Inherent Pipeline Security and Compliance with Chef
Attaching codified assets to an application release at the source control level is the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to ensure compliance and accelerate delivery. Chef embeds security testing and remediation in the entire delivery process and deeply understands dependencies so teams can correct issues as early as possible, make changes confidently, and gain real-time visibility into risk. All Chef published artifacts are stored in a single-origin that can not be accessed by humans, ensuring they are immutable. Responsible teams know the status of every release along with how the release was configured and who configured it.
Chef 360 further simplifies the security of pipelines by providing standards-based audit and remediation content. Chef 360 helps security and operations teams maintain complete visibility over the compliance status of their estate, while closing the loop between audit and remediation to enable continuous compliance in the enterprise. It comes with extensive audit and remediation content based on CIS benchmarks and DISA-STIGs out of the box that can be easily tuned to meet specific needs of every organization.
“Getting rid of our homegrown tools and replacing them with Habitat made a huge difference in terms of consistency, reliability and visibility.”
Scott Lappin
Director of DevOps, Panera Bread
