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Rule the cloud with Chef and Windows Server 2016

Lucas Welch | Posted on | announcements | community | customers | DevOps | events | news | partners

Chef has a long history of collaborating with Microsoft Corp. to help enterprise organizations migrate to the cloud and automate Microsoft Azure environments. We’re proud of all we’ve accomplished together and excited about what’s next.

This week we have a large Chef team on the ground at Microsoft Ignite. We’ll be sharing the latest capabilities for automating everything from Windows Server to Microsoft Azure with Chef.

One of the most exciting updates is Microsoft’s announcement of Windows Server 2016, a cloud-ready operating system that delivers new layers of security and Azure-inspired innovation for applications and infrastructure. Chef can help users optimize their Windows Server 2016 workloads in a number of ways:

  • Chef integrates with Windows PowerShell DSC. As this platform evolves alongside Windows Server 2016, customers will be able to easily use these technologies together. We’ve worked closely with the PowerShell team to ensure that Chef’s DSC integration works well from Windows Server 2012 R2 through Windows Server 2016.
  • Chef Automate provides a safe, transparent workflow for validating Windows Server 2016 updates. Our product aligns with Microsoft’s built-in security capabilities, helping users to prevent attacks and protect systems against potential threats.
  • We’ve worked with the Microsoft Operations Management Suite team to integrate data from the Chef server into the Operations Management Suite to enhance system-wide visibility. In fact, we’ll be demonstrating this integration in our booth #2039.

Just yesterday, we released InSpec 1.0, the first full version of our year-old open source project that automates compliance as code. InSpec 1.0 features wide Microsoft Windows coverage with full remote capabilities and CIS compliance benchmarks. We also have cool developments in the works for Habitat and Windows Server 2016, including the new Nano Server option. If you stop by our booth, we’ll be happy to tell you more.

In our years working with many Microsoft teams, it’s been great to share a commitment to open source. You likely read that Microsoft recently open sourced PowerShell and made it available on Linux. What you may not know is we helped Jeffrey Snover and the PowerShell team at Microsoft understand how to set up an effective OSS governance model.

All this work builds on years of engineering together to integrate Chef with the Microsoft enterprise cloud platform, helping customers rapidly move Windows and Linux workloads to Azure. Together, Chef and Microsoft are providing enterprises with the tools, skills, and guidance to make IT innovation easier and faster.

Some accomplishments we’re proud of:

  • Chef Cookbooks: Microsoft published a collection of Chef Cookbooks, providing rock-solid code for automating the provisioning and management of compute and storage instances in Azure.
  • Skills Enablement: Chef has delivered hundreds of hours of DevOps education in Microsoft’s expansive ecosystem across industry events, digital channels, and community meetups. Watch our own Matt Wrock presenting with Jeffrey Snover on how to validate Chef Recipes with ChefSpec and PowerShell on Linux.

 

We think Chef and Microsoft make a great team. This post could go on and on about using Chef in Windows Server and Azure environments to get the agility you need. But we’d rather talk in-person, so come visit us in booth 2039 at Ignite!