Supporting your Journey to Continuous Automation on Learn Chef Rally

Most successful organizations pursue continuous automation in three stages: detect, correct, and automate. Our very own Nick Rycar recently covered this framework at length in both a blog post and webinar.

In case you missed it, adopting the DCA frameworks means:

• Detecting where your systems deviate from your standards.
• Correcting any deviations to meet your standards.
• Automating both processes to improve speed and efficiency.

Compliance Track Updates

To support this journey and build your DCA knowledge and skills, we’ve released updates to the following Learn Chef Rally tracks.

Compliance Automation with InSpec

This track is all about detecting where your systems deviate from your standards. It’s a great place to get started with InSpec, whether you use Chef or another automation framework to configure your systems.

Integrated Compliance with Chef

This track combines InSpec, Chef, and Chef Automate to teach you the complete Detect, Correct, Automate process through working examples. It’s a great way to continue your DCA journey, especially if you’re interested in using Chef to configure your systems and correct potential issues.

This release features easy-to-use training environments that are based on Docker containers. These environments include:

• A workstation that contains all the tools you need to get started.
• Target systems for you to practice the detect and correct process.
• Chef Automate Pilot, a trial version of Chef Automate that runs on your laptop.

These environments are based on Linux, but the concepts apply equally to Windows.

What’s included?

Here’s a quick summary of what you’ll learn.

Both tracks start with  Try InSpec. Here, you get set up with your environment and see what InSpec can do. This module also appears in the  Demos and Quickstarts track.

Compliance Automation with InSpec also includes:

• Explore InSpec resources – Learn how InSpec profiles are structured and how to use InSpec shell to explore what resources are available. You use InSpec to verify an NGINX installation.
• Create an InSpec profile from compliance documentation – Examine a compliance benchmark provided by the Center for Internet Security and translate that benchmark to InSpec code.
• Automating compliance for finance – Learn how HPE Datacenter Care Service uses InSpec in the finance industry.

Integrated Compliance with Chef also includes:

• Try Chef Automate – Get set up with Chef Automate Pilot. You scan a few systems for compliance and see the results in the web interface.
• Detect and correct with Test Kitchen – Learn how to run InSpec on local test infrastructure and generate a report. You write a Chef cookbook that corrects one of the reported issues.
• Detect and correct with Chef Automate – See how to run InSpec profiles on your systems and send the data back to Chef Automate. You correct an issue and see the results through the web interface.
• Create a custom InSpec profile – Learn how to customize an existing InSpec profile to meet your specific needs.
• Compliance in action – Learn how Cloudticity’s HIPAA Compliance as a Service uses Chef’s automated compliance capabilities on AWS.

Get started and track your progress

These updated tracks await you on Learn Chef Rally. Be sure to take a moment to create your profile so that you can track your progress and earn badges for your completed tracks.

In the coming weeks, we’ll have more in store for you, including how InSpec can help you verify your cloud infrastructure running on AWS and Microsoft Azure. We’d also love to hear your feedback and suggestions. Reach out to us at training@chef.io.