That’s a wrap, folks! The most awaited week has come and gone by, and we thank you all for making it a huge success. This year was bigger than ever before, being a part of Progress 360 — an event for Developers, DevOps and IT Security Professionals.
ChefConf ‘22 was packed full of amazing sessions and inspiring keynotes, just like it is every year. The event included major product announcements, speakers from Google, H&R Block, SAP, and TataElxsi discussing key topics such as cloud security, managing DevSecOps complexity, automation, community chats, live product demos, and more. With nearly 2000+ registrations from 42 countries, 30+ sessions, our 11th annual ChefConf has come to an end.
Did you miss something? No worries, we have you covered with this recap. And if you want to dig into more ChefConf content, all sessions are available on-demand.
Here is What Happened Day One at ChefConf ’22
Day one kicked off with a keynote speech from Yogesh Gupta, CEO of Progress. Yogesh discussed how technology has helped people make it through these extremely challenging times and how it has evolved. “It is changing the way people live. And it is YOU who is making that better. So, you are making people not waste their time because of the systems you’ve built. It is about improving people’s lives.” he said. “You should never forget the purpose. The purpose is to make people’s lives better.” Yogesh was joined by three guests and Katie Canty from Panera Bread was one of them.
Katie shared a real-life use case on how they increased service deployment success “from 85% to five nines” and increased their deployment frequency by 10,000 (!) percent when they switched from a home-grown solution to Progress Chef Habitat.
Followed by a keynote “Managing DevOps Complexity” from Sundar Subramanian, Progress EVP and GM. The highlights from this keynote emphasized the importance of “as Code” approach that makes collaboration easier by offering a consistent, organized method for handling policies. Sundar announced the winners of the 2022 Awesome Awards, and they are:
Community Awesome Award 2022 Winners
- Lance Albertson
- Brittany Woods
- Takuya Noguchi
Progress Chef Partner Awards 2022 Winners
- Bluechip
- tecRacer
- TapHere! Technology
Prashanth Nanjundappa, VP Product Management, Progress Chef joined by the product management team announced several new enhancements planned to the Chef portfolio – all designed based on the feedback from the users and the community. The team also walked through several product announcements that took place over the past year which included:
- Flexible deployment models: On-Prem, Chef SaaS, Marketplaces (AWS & Azure), & High Availability
- Automate: Infra Views
- Data Feed
- IOT + Edge Management
- Launch of Chef Cloud Security
- New Audit & Remediation content in Chef Compliance
Here’s a doodle by Barry Coombs to summarize the entire session highlighting key insights:
(Doodle by Barry Coombs)
Here is What Happened Day Two at ChefConf ’22
Day 2 began with a Keynote: Where Does DevSecOps Go from Here?, where Aaron Kraft, VP Engineering, Progress Chef hosted a fireside chat about shifting left and sharing how incorporating security will take you to the next level.
“There are three different things we should consider when we look at the next generation DevSecOps.” Aaron noted. One, provide a more holistic approach to operations. DevSecOps is an idea, it has goals, and it has objectives. Automation in times is the mechanism behind making it work. We need to simplify how automation works. Two, focus on human-centric approaches to problem solving. What does it take to solve a problem? The question you should be asking is what is best for business and what is best for customers. Three, make tools easy to use to meet the needs of the coming scale.
Aaron discussed some things on the horizon such as advancements in AI & ML for automated operations, needed simplifications of systems & device management, operation support for Low Code & AI Code, and better integration of operations between applications and systems and how Progress Chef can help.
Breakout Sessions
We’ve put together the most watched session for ChefConf this year.
- Modelling Threats and Vulnerabilities for Secure CI/CD Through Chef Automation Stack: Krithika, Lead DevOps engineer, MSys Technologies discussed about the ways in which we can accelerate application engineering with shift left in Continuous Delivery and how enterprise automation stack helps DevSecOps teams with securing, managing and deploying the application with business-aligned teams, consistent security and infrastructure agnostic deliveries.
- WTH is CSPM and Why Should I Care?: Joined by Konrad Schieban, Strategic Cloud Engineer at Google, Sarah Gori, Consulting Director at ScaleSec, and Kiah, Developer Advocate at Progress Chef discussed on why security compliance management is important.
- Config Management Isn’t Dead: Brittany Wood, H&R Block discussed where’s config management is going and how Chef Compliance fits into the picture. Brittany said “A point that I brought up is that config management is also for cloud too. How does compliance fit in the equation? We want to make sure our individual resources are compliant. But it is also important to look at automating the configuration of your cloud environment as well.”
- Platform Strategy: The Future of Chef: Find out how the four bubbles which surround Chef ecosystem can help us move to platformization. George Westwater, Director of Software Engineering for Chef, discussed on our evolution to a comprehensive platform strategy.
- Operating at Scale: Takeaways from an Ever-Growing Multi-Cloud Landscape: The SAP team, Rohit and Justin gave an overview of the development and operational solutions they've applied based on takeaways from operating in an ever-growing multi-cloud landscape.
This year’s ChefConf was one to remember, just in case you missed something, you can watch the replays at any time from the comfort of wherever you are.