Over the last year, we’ve adopted a monthly release cadence for chef-client and chefdk. That regular cadence has served us well, allowing users to predictably plan for and schedule upgrades. Today, we’re pleased to announce that Chef Automate will follow suit and also adopt a monthly release cadence. This change allows customers to more easily and safely consume updates to our rapidly evolving commercial platform.
The 1st Monday of each month, we will ship a new stable release of Chef Automate. As always, users who want all newest released features and bug fixes can still access nightly builds by downloading the ‘current‘ release. However, Chef recommends that most users should install the monthly ‘stable’ release.
Our inaugural monthly release of Chef Automate includes FIPS Support for Chef Automate.
The United States Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 defines cryptographic algorithms approved for use by US Federal government computer systems for the protection of sensitive data. In 2016, we released a feature that restricts communication between Chef servers and clients to only allow FIPS compliant encryption algorithms. With this release, Chef Automate and the tools that connect to it are now configurable into a FIPS 140-2 compliant mode. This feature helps customers subject to United States Federal Information Processing Standards maintain compliance for network communications when using Chef in conjunction with Chef Automate. In tandem with this release, customers should also upgrade ChefDK to ensure that communications between workstations and Chef Automate are fully compliant.
Several additional bugfixes and enhancements are included in this release. As always, you can see a full list of changes and specific requirements in release announcements on the Chef Mailing List.