By providing organizations with the ability to launch and scale environments on-demand, the cloud has changed how we develop applications and deploy infrastructure, allowing us to iterate faster than previously imaginable. It’s no surprise, then, that cloud migrations have become a hot topic in our industry. A recent survey of Chef users found that a whopping 95% of respondents are currently in some phase of cloud adoption. It’s worth noting, however, that while the survey captured users from a variety of industries, with varying levels of cloud maturity, respondents reported that on average a third of their infrastructure is expected to remain on premises for the foreseeable future.
Ultimately, this means that organizations need a way to manage the security and configuration of multi-datacenter or multi-cloud environments consistently without also creating unsustainable maintenance overhead by duplicating work across those environments. Organizations will also need a way to evaluate the bigger picture of their environments’ health as a whole so that they can quickly and efficiently detect and correct any issues that arise. It’s in solving these problems that the power and flexibility of Chef Automate really shines.
I’ve spoken at length in the past about Continuous Automation, but it boils down to a simple, repeatable workflow: Detect, Correct, Automate. If we can automate the process of identifying and remediating issues, and apply both continuously, we have the ability to spend more time building new content and less time re-solving recurring issues.
Below, you’ll find a recording of a webinar I recently co-presented. In it, we take a look at how this process can be applied to assist in migrating to the cloud, specifically Amazon Web Services. By defining your requirements and configurations in code, InSpec and Chef enable your organization to consistently and portably deploy and maintain the systems they manage. Through Chef’s integrations with AWS, that same code can be used to launch fully-configured instances into the cloud, while also providing the means to account for per-environment differences within the same base configuration and audit policy. You’ll also see how, with Chef Automate, you can now maintain visibility into the health and change history of systems across your environments in a single dashboard. Using Chef Automate’s built-in CIS Benchmark profiles, you’ll also see how to enforce consistent security rigor to on-prem and cloud environments alike.
With that, dive in and see how Chef Automate can help you start your cloud journey with confidence! Stay tuned at the end for some Q&A and follow-up resources.
If you’re itching to start preparing for the cloud, we’ve got just the things to give you a leg-up!