2017 has been an incredible year for InSpec; the community continues to grow and the project continues to evolve in amazing ways. As the year winds down, I’d like to take a few minutes to reflect on our collective accomplishments.
Since the beginning of the year, we have merged 520 pull requests to the InSpec project! Out of the 520 PRs, 30% of them were submitted by non-Chef employees. That alone is an amazing number, and I am personally so incredibly grateful for the continued contributions we receive from the open source community.
Many of those PRs introduced new capabilities to InSpec, and with new capabilities mean new users and use cases. Over the past year, InSpec has gained 23 new resources, giving InSpec the native ability to test 23 more items for compliance. 12 of those new resources were developed and contributed by our community. Again, we cannot thank you enough.
We currently have 746 members hanging out and participating in our #inspec channel on the Chef Community Slack with the number growing every day. If you haven’t tried it out, join us. It’s the best place to ask questions, get answers, give answers, and meet a new friend!
In 2018, we are planning to introduce the ability to query cloud infrastructure resources directly from InSpec. You will be able to make assertions such as “my AWS EC2 instance must be in the correct security group” and “my Azure virtual machine must be a particular SKU” in an InSpec profile. The InSpec Engineering team, along with community assistance, are cranking away at adding many additional resources to provide lots of testing ability for AWS, Azure, and VMware.
Currently, this development is being done in a series of incubator projects called “resource packs.” A “resource pack” is a special InSpec profile that contains resources but no controls. You can depend on these profiles and use them today to see how they work. For more information, visit each of the projects directly:
In 2018, this functionality will be added directly into InSpec!
In addition to the new cloud resources being added to InSpec, InSpec 2.0 will include a number of changes to clean up the user experience and remove deprecated behavior. Some of these changes add some really great functionality, such as the ability to clearly define what operating systems a particular resource supports. However, some of these changes are not backward compatible with existing InSpec versions, so the team is working diligently to ensure each of these areas are emitting clear deprecation warnings when you use InSpec.
Be sure to check out the InSpec 2.0 milestone in GitHub to learn about our plans.
Acting as the community advocate for InSpec is incredibly rewarding, but honestly, you all make it so easy. The team and I are extremely grateful for your support and for your trust in us and our project. We wish you all a wonderful holiday season and new year and can’t wait to see what 2018 brings!