Progress Announces New Release of the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack and Chef Infra Client 17

“Today’s release not only builds on our commitment to drive innovation to the Chef community, but also on our vision of delivering a unified and scalable platform that accelerates the rate in which enterprise DevSecOps can deliver changes in hybrid-cloud, regulated and edge computing environments,” said Sundar Subramanian, General Manager, Chef Business, Progress.

Chef Enterprise Automation Stack

The latest release of the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) is designed to bring together familiar elements of the Chef ecosystem into a more integrated automation solution. Chef EAS gives DevSecOps teams scalable patterns they can use to minimize the effort needed to implement complex solutions, enables full-stack visibility across heterogeneous infrastructure and applications, and unifies the experience for developers, operators, and administrators. It makes infrastructure and application delivery more secure and less complicated so it’s easier to extend value across teams at scale.

New features in EAS include:

• Chef Infra Compliance Phase: Enables Chef® InSpec® users to automatically execute compliance audits as part of any Chef Infra Client run. This new feature dramatically simplifies the workflow needed to run compliance audits, view results and conduct analysis. It also simplifies the implementation of patch management, continuous compliance and other common use cases. 
• Chef Infra State Management Dashboards: Allows users to view and manage Chef Infra Server details in Chef® Automate™. The new views when combined with Chef Infra Client Run Reports provide detailed insights into the various policies and Chef objects in use on a system, making managing infrastructure easier. 
• Unified Developer Experience: Chef® Workstation™ now includes the Chef® Habitat® CLI, giving Chef developers all the tools needed to get started with Chef EAS in one easy-to-install package.  

Chef Infra Client 17  

The new release builds upon Progress’ efforts to make Chef easier to use for a wider range of audiences and use cases. Chef Infra Client 17 comes equipped with a significant number of new pre-built resources, helpers and cookbooks created by both Chef and the Chef Community.

New features in Chef Infra Client 17 deliver:

• Streamlined Developer Experiences: Improvements to Chef Workstation, cloud integrations, hypervisor support, and system architectures to ensure fewer challenges for developers in the coding process.
• Increased Platform Coverage and Support: Expanded coverage and support for ARM in the cloud, macOS Big Sur, the Apple M1 architecture, Windows 8 and PowerShell Core. 
• Improved Cloud Detection, Security and Data Aggregation: New, more secure AWS metadata for better data gathering for cloud instances. Improved and more intelligent Azure data gathering allows users to manage systems based on more environmental variables. 

“Enterprise DevSecOps teams today need scalable solutions that are easy to integrate into existing pipelines with low barriers to entry,” said Jim Mercer, Research Director, DevOps & DevSecOps, IDC. “Solutions that heavily leverage open source contributions often create good market value, having been developed collaboratively with users themselves to address their most current and pressing business needs.” 

Chef Infra Client 17 will be generally available on April 28. For more information, sign up for the launch event here. 

Chef Community Recognition

A new program designed to acknowledge Chef Community contributors, the program includes personal recognition from the Progress Management Team, in addition to participation in an annual Chef Community event. In 2020, there were more than 400 contributions made by the Chef community in support of Chef Infra, Chef InSpec and Chef Habitat. Many of the contributors that worked to bring these contributions to bear will be recognized as part of the April 28 launch event. 

ChefConf 2021, a leading DevOps event, will be hosted online September 7-9, 2021. Sign up on the ChefConf 2021 “Save the Date” page for updates.