Why Coded Enterprises are Winning at DevOps

More than 10 years ago Chef ushered in the era of DevOps with the introduction of Chef, the “infrastructure as code” tool. Fundamental to the success of Chef was the belief that “the best way to build software is to do it in close collaboration with the people who use it.” Today there are more than 70,000 registered users in the Chef Community who have collectively contributed to the creation of more than 3,500 Chef Infra Cookbooks. 

But as we learned on the webinar “Building the Coded Enterprise” presented by Corey Scobie, Chef SVP of Products and Engineering, infrastructure expressed as code was just the beginning of Chef’s story. Today, Chef enables DevOps teams to express not only infrastructure as code, but also security policies and application dependencies. Chef Enterprise Automation Stack provides a means to define that code, deploy those instructions across heterogeneous environments, and enable ongoing monitoring and reporting.  

Chef customers include some of the largest organizations in the world and use Chef to build, deploy, secure and manage mission-critical systems both on-premises and in the cloud. During the webinar, Scobie shared a number of impressive success metrics from these customers: 

• Reduction in infrastructure deployment times by 80% over manual processes 
• Reduction in audit times by up to 93% 
• Reduction in application update times from 7 days to seconds 
• Elimination of 50% of application failure rates in production due to run-time errors

Winning in today’s market is all about merging the digital experience with a company’s core competencies. Digital transformation is driven through technology investments and results. According to a recent report from IDC “Businesses will spend nearly $1.2 trillion on digital transformation in 2019 as they seek an edge in the digital economy.” 

Unfortunately, not all organizations will succeed nor see the return on their investments. Digital transformation is hard. In addition to the large amount of capital and resources needed to transform organizations must overcome a host of other challenges including: 

• Org friction and culture – How do you leave behind some of the processes and values of the past and get people with different communication styles and skill sets to work in parallel together?  How do you get people to feel comfortable working in a constant state of change?
• Balance of old and new – Most organizations have a broad mix of technologies in use. Every new technology acquired by an organization adds to the maintenance load. Even SaaS and cloud based solutions have to be integrated, secured and maintained at some level. How do you efficiently transform the old while continually improving the new?  
• Visibility and risk mitigation – How do you ensure new changes don’t break existing systems and disrupt business? How do you give management the real-time data that they need to run the business across so many disparate systems?  

There are no easy answers to these questions and each organization has their own unique challenges to overcome. Even with this, Chef has recognized that there are common patterns of success across customers that are winning at DevOps. These include:

1. Adopting a coded approach
2. Making it easy to work with code
3. Using the right tool for the right job 
4. Enabling one-way to production
5. Shifting risk mitigation left

To learn more on these common patterns of success you can watch the recorded webinar now.