New Chef Automate Functionality and End of Life Impacts

Note [Updated on August 8, 2022]: The end-of-life (EOL) date for Chef Manage 2.5.x+ and Chef Backend 2.x has been extended from December 31, 2022. We will announce the new EOL date by Nov 30, 2022, and new EOL date will be no earlier than Nov 30, 2023. For more information read the updated product announcement “New Chef Infra Server Automate Functionality and EOL Updates for Chef Manage and Backend”.

Note: The end-of-life (EOL) dates for Chef Manage 2.5.x+, Chef Backend 2.x have been extended from December 31, 2021 to December 31, 2022. For more information read the updated product announcement “New Chef Infra Server Automate Functionality and EOL Updates for Chef Manage and Backend”.

Chef Automate Infra Server

On the heels of an extremely successful virtual ChefConf 2020, we at Chef are proud of the receptiveness and positive feedback we’ve received from customers and prospects on the announcements we made. 

To continue this trend, we’re pleased to announce plans for Chef Automate, which will incrementally add Chef Infra Server’s capabilities to Chef Automate. This change will make Chef Automate a single tool for managing all of your Chef automation, providing a superior user experience and reducing management overhead. While this has an impact on existing Chef Infra Server plugins, which is covered below, we would like to assure our community that the functionality that you have grown accustomed to and love about Chef Infra Server and its plugins today will be available with the upcoming Chef Automate Infra Server.

Chef Automate Infra Server currently supports the same command line and API management as Chef Infra Server (e.g. orgs, cookbooks, data bags) as well as Chef Automate’s read-only views that provide the same insight as Chef Manage. By the end of 2020, Chef Automate Infra Server will also support all read-write functionality available to Chef Manage. We encourage users that do not leverage the write functionality to install and configure Automate Infra Server with infrastructure views.

Chef Automate Infra Server also supports Automate’s existing high-availability solution Chef Automate HA Cluster. For more information regarding Chef Automate HA Cluster, please contact your sales representative or customer success account team.

Impact to existing features

With the future advent of Chef Automate Infra Server, we would like to announce the Deprecation and/or End of Life dates for the following:

• Chef Manage – the GUI for Chef Infra Server and which functionality will be incorporated by Chef Automate Infra Server. Read only functionality parity is already available. Write functional parity by the end of 2020.
  Deprecation Date: June 30, 2020
  End of Life Date: To be determined (TBD)

• Chef Backend – Chef Automate provides a better user experience and maintenance path than Chef Infra Server with Chef Backend (which is replaced by Chef Automate High Availability). Expected functionally is currently available. For more information please contact your Customer Success or Field Sales teams.
  Deprecation Date: June 30, 2020
  End of Life Date: To be determined (TBD)

• Push Jobs (Server & Client) – an ad-hoc run engine to execute jobs against targets outside of scheduled runs and which functionality will be replaced with more modern practices.
  Deprecation Date: June 30, 2020
  End of Life Date: To be determined (TBD)
  
  
• Chef Infra Server 12 – Chef Infra Server is and will continue to be a valuable piece of our Chef Infra kit. It is somewhat of a support and maintenance burden for customers so, as  Automate Infra Server has matured, it is time to pivot toward using it going forward.
  Deprecation Date: June 30, 2020
  End of Life Date: To be determined (TBD)
  
  
• Chef Workflow (A2) – Chef Workflow is a feature that has been deprecated and Chef recommends integration with mature solutions (eg. Jenkins, GitLab) for CI/CD pipeline functionality.
  Deprecation Date: April 1, 2019
  End of Life Date: To be determined (TBD)

What’s not impacted

Chef Infra Server is very much an integral part of the Chef ecosystem, and while plugins will be impacted, Chef Infra Server 13 itself is not impacted by this announcement. We do not currently have an end of life date for Chef Infra Server13+.

What’s next

If you are interested in using the Chef Automate Infra Server to consolidate your Chef infrastructure today, please review the existing documentation and work with your Customer Success Team to make sure you are able to access Chef Automate Infra Server.