Chef Unveils New Flagship Product Chef Automate

New Commercial Offering Unifies How Modern Application Teams Collaborate to Automate Software Delivery at Speed and Scale

AUSTIN, TX – July 12, 2016 – From ChefConf 2016, Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, today announced Chef Automate, its new commercial offering that gives businesses unprecedented control and collaboration across the entire software delivery process. Chef Automate unifies Chef’s entire product portfolio into a single offering, integrating a shared workflow pipeline for continuous deployment, formerly Chef Delivery, and Chef Compliance, which allows customers to meet security and regulatory requirements. In addition, Chef Automate includes a new Visibility feature that, for the first time, provides sophisticated analytics into all resources managed by Chef through a single interface. Chef Automate enables any enterprise to safely deploy infrastructure and applications at high velocity and scale.

Chef Automate builds on the company’s widely adopted open-source projects: Chef for infrastructure and cloud automation, InSpec for encoding compliance policy, and the newly released Habitat for application automation.

Automation is the foundation of high velocity business. Chef’s flexible, open source technology has become the automation standard upon which businesses build systems that respond quickly and safely to changing needs. Chef Automate brings together the best of Chef’s proven automation capabilities into a unified offering, providing enterprises with a common workflow for testing and releasing software. This encourages successful collaboration and makes it easier to deploy projects with many dependencies that span multiple teams.

Product Highlights

Chef Automate is a complete solution for automating the entire technology stack — from IT system components all the way to the applications — through a fixed, efficient, and reusable workflow. Chef Automate enables DevOps success in the enterprise by delivering:

• Comprehensive Visibility: Chef Automate provides system-wide insight across all applications and their supporting environments, such as development, quality assurance and production. For the first time, Chef is giving users the power to monitor and manage IT processes and environments all through a single interface. This helps companies improve efficiency, quickly identify system issues and reduce risk. Visibility delivers deep insight into operational, compliance and workflow events with:
  • A single dashboard with access to analytics, trending data, and health status about all Chef-managed resources, including Chef Automate, as well as open source Chef, InSpec, and Habitat.
  • Sophisticated search and filter capabilities to see the status of single resources or groups of resources.
  • Visualization of successful changes, failures and entire deployments to gain actionable insight into system trends.
• Unified Workflow: Chef Automate includes a shared pipeline (previously Chef Delivery) that provides a fixed, efficient and reusable workflow delivering both speed and safety when changing infrastructure or applications. The new enterprise-grade workflow management console provides a single interface for monitoring progress and promoting changes as they move from development to production.
• Proactive Compliance: Chef Automate lets companies proactively know whether they are operating according to their organization’s security policies. Chef Automate enables you to identify and remediate any compliance issues early in the development process, well before deployment to production. This makes determining compliance a fast, automated process that occurs as the software moves through the pipeline. Chef Automate also includes prewritten compliance profiles based on Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Because it is an integrated platform, Chef Automate visualizes the status of nodes in terms of their adherence to policy.

Chef Automate is available immediately through an annual pricing. It includes commercial support for Chef, InSpec and Habitat. These three open source projects are all under the Apache 2.0 license and available for free download.

Chef also today announced its new Chef Certification Program (see separate release). The program offers training and credentials for developers, system administrators and IT practitioners everywhere who demonstrate the skills needed for DevOps success using Chef products. This new program augments Chef’s existing Partner Certification Program by providing a clear skills development path that partners can use to train their services and support teams on Chef Automate.

Company Momentum

Chef is at the forefront of the Agile, Lean and DevOps movements and continues to experience rapid business and community growth. The release of Chef Automate reflects the company’s deep experience with hundreds of commercial customers who use automation to drive DevOps transformation.

Today, more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from enterprise organizations, with more than 900 commercial customers using Chef to become software-driven organizations. Chef has tens of millions of machines under management on any given day. To date, the Chef client has been downloaded more than 37 million times, with an average of more than 1.5 million downloads per month in 2016. This momentum contributed to Chef’s total bookings growing more than 80 percent year-over-year in Q2 2016.

Regionally, Chef’s EMEA business continues to rapidly expand with revenue, annual recurring revenue (ARR) and total number of customers all doubling in the last 12 months. Chef’s EMEA business now serves more than 150 customers in the entire region, from South Africa to the United Kingdom to the Netherlands.

The partner ecosystem surrounding Chef continues to rapidly expand and mature. Chef’s Partner Cookbook Program, which guides partners through best practices for Cookbook creation and maintenance, has more than doubled in size in just four months. The program began with 3Scale, Alert Logic, CloudPassage, Dynatrace, Infoblox, and NetApp all open-sourcing tested Cookbooks users can trust to automate the toughest enterprise IT environments. The program has expanded and additional partners now include Heavy Water Consulting, Datadog, Graylog, Rackspace, Sumo Logic, and Threat Stack, setting a new standard in code quality for automating everything from applications to storage resources. Partner Cookbooks are now available for download through the Chef Supermarket.

ChefConf 2016 brings together more than 1,500 IT leaders and DevOps practitioners at the JW Marriott in Austin, TX, today and tomorrow to take DevOps further than ever before. The conference will be live streamed at https://chefconf.chef.io/. Chef customers and partners, including Amazon Web Services, Adobe Systems, Alaska Airlines, Arista Networks, Booz Allen Hamilton, Facebook, GE Digital, Hearst Business Media, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Microsoft, NCR, National Football League, Nordstrom, SAP NS2, Samsung Electronics America, Standard Bank, Target, Texas A&M University, and WestPac NCZ are all presenting at this year’s conference.

Supporting Quotes

“Velocity is the ultimate goal of every business and in today’s software-driven economy, that can only happen through IT automation. However, many organizations are still forced to choose between speed and security. We think that’s absurd. Chef Automate allows businesses everywhere to stop trading off between velocity and safety — you can have both.”

• Ken Cheney, Vice President of Business Development and Product Marketing, Chef

Additional Resources

• Watch the ChefConf live stream.
• Read more about Chef Automate.
• Try Chef Automate.
• Learn more about Chef, InSpec and Habitat.