DEVOPSdigest

Chef announced several new offerings that help customers migrate legacy applications onto and manage configuration and compliance of their Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

These include a public preview of Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure, seamless integration of Chef Workstation with Azure Cloud Shell, and new compliance automation capabilities for InSpec by Chef when used with Azure.

The integration of Chef’s suite of automation tools with Azure gives users the computing power needed to continuously automate infrastructure, applications and compliance across their environments, regardless of their size. This results in increased velocity with reduced risk.

Today’s announcements include:

- Public preview of Chef Automate Managed Service for Azure accelerates organizations’ time-to-value by removing the effort of deploying and managing Chef Automate on their own. This includes full support for Chef Automate 2.0 as a fully-managed service including automatic updates.

- Chef Workstation integration with Azure Cloud Shell provides a quick method for applying configuration changes to users’ systems, regardless of whether they are managed by Chef, and without requiring any pre-installed software -- all within the Azure portal. Access to Chef Workstation in Azure Cloud Shell, coupled with InSpec, lets users run configuration commands and compliance checks on nodes that were previously not managed by Chef for continuous automation across their entire Azure platform.

- Integration of InSpec with Azure’s cloud infrastructure (beta), in combination with Chef Automate 2 compliance profiles for Azure’s CIS Benchmark, gives users the ability to automate compliance audits for all application environments directly from Azure Cloud Shell. Microsoft's newly released Azure Policy Guest Configuration uses InSpec for all Linux VMs that are managed by Azure Policy.

“Chef gives companies the tools they need to confidently migrate to Microsoft Azure so users don’t just move their problems when migrating to the cloud, but have an understanding of the state of their assets before the migration occurs,” said Corey Scobie, SVP of Products and Engineering at Chef. “Being able to detect and correct configuration and security issues to ensure success after migrations gives our customers the power to migrate at the right pace for their organization. Today’s news builds on our long-established collaboration with Microsoft and our commitment to delivering new automation solutions that will help Azure and Azure Stack customers accelerate digital transformation.”

Jeremy Winter, Director, Azure Management & Portal at Microsoft said, “Chef automation is a critical component of many customers automation environments. This new and deeper Chef integration with Microsoft Azure helps our mutual customers get going faster with less focus on configuring up infrastructure and more focus on automating consistent configurations at scale.”