DEVOPSdigest

Chef introduced Dependency Management, a new feature of its Chef Delivery product, that enables faster and safer developer collaboration by allowing Chef Delivery to know which services and applications in the pipeline depend on one another.

With Dependency Management, not only must changes pass local tests, but related, downstream components or services must pass those tests, as well. Only service changes that pass are promoted, so deployments to production are safe. Dependency Management enables a reliable, repeatable and scalable process for cross-team collaboration in large enterprises. It doesn’t matter if there are two developers or thousands of staff — teams can create and safely deploy interconnected services on diverse runtime environments, including containers.

Chef also announced enhanced capabilities for Chef Compliance to enable automated management of compliance policies that are based on the broadly used Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Users can now implement CIS and other compliance policies as code, called “compliance profiles.” In addition, Chef Compliance offers an enhanced Windows experience by allowing users to import Windows policies from the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager.

By using compliance profiles in conjunction with Dependency Management, users can enforce these policies with Chef Delivery to ensure that changes to infrastructure and applications meet all requirements across the pipeline. Together these two new features enable users to easily input, track, and test service runtime dependencies. Simultaneously, users can incorporate CIS benchmarks profile into Delivery’s automated testing pipeline to create a foundation for meeting Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.

Software is now the competitive currency of the enterprise. However, software is also becoming increasingly complex and composed of interdependent services that reside in the cloud. Businesses must be able to develop and maintain these intricate applications, along with the infrastructure that supports them, while moving at high velocity. It is critical that any changes to applications and infrastructure be versioned and tested before they are deployed to production. Because multiple teams often work on a single application, cross-team collaboration and transparency are critical to the success of a project. The DevOps workflow, which uses both culture and technology to foster these values, is becoming the most effective approach to developing software quickly and safely. Chef has distilled its customers’ successful workflow patterns into Chef Delivery, where service dependencies can be predefined and compliance requirements become part of the development pipeline. Chef Delivery eliminates silos and project segregation, enabling developers and operations personnel to begin committing code to the primary development pipeline in their first week on the team, instead of waiting weeks or even months in traditional environments.

Alex Ethier, Chef’s vice president of product, commented: "Enterprises need comprehensive solutions to safely implement DevOps in the push toward ever-greater development velocity. Unlike other frameworks and tools, Chef Delivery doesn’t just help you build a change management pipeline, it is the pipeline. We’re committed to advancing our product in a way that enables developers, operations and IT to collectively manage the speed and scale of enterprise business."