Happy Birthday OWCA! Plus the Latest Chef Innovations for AWS Customers

Last year at AWS re:Invent, Chef was excited to join Amazon VP & CTO Werner Vogels to announce the availability of OpsWorks for Chef Automate (OWCA). As the first provider of configuration management through OpsWorks, Chef has a long standing commitment to the success of AWS customers. Today, I want to share some of our latest features and innovations for AWS as we kickoff re:Invent in Las Vegas.

This batch of announcements build on last year’s release to provide even better AWS application development and management support across the entire app lifecycle. Along with support AWS announced earlier this month around the new OpsWorks update to Chef Automate 1.6, we are announcing native EC2 Container Registry support for Habitat Builder, and that Chef is available to US government customers through the AWS GovCloud private cloud.

Our long-time partnership with Amazon lets us deliver this latest round of features to AWS customers. It’s been a year since OpsWorks for Chef Automate was announced as the first configuration management service offered by a partner to AWS customers. This early partnership gave us a great head start in maturing our service and offering new and enhanced capabilities to AWS customers.

Detect and Correct with OWCA

And we’ve used the last 12 months to deliver more innovation to AWS shops. The upgrade of OpsWorks for Chef Automate to Chef Automate 1.6 brings our detect-correct-automate capabilities to OWCA customers. This lets organizations run compliance and audits on their cloud and on-prem systems using both homegrown and publicly available compliance packages. And these scans are both managed and visualized in OWCA. This means that you can point OWCA at your servers and nodes, both in AWS as well as in your own data centers, to manage and quickly understand the compliance state of your systems.

Habitat Builder EC2 container registry

The improvements to Chef Automate I’ve described focus on the “Ops” side of the DevOps equation. The next announcement switches gears to how we support the success of developers in a cloud-native environment. Last month we delivered our Habitat Builder SaaS offering, which is the fastest path from code to Docker container. At re:Invent, we are announcing support for delivering Habitat packages directly into the EC2 container registry. Habitat Builder gives developers an easy way to take your code (currently Node.js, Ruby, Java) and automatically build fully packaged containers (including supervisor code) into a container registry.

With the addition of EC2 container registry, now developers can build for containers running on AWS simply by checking in new code to GitHub. Habitat’s build service then automatically updates the build, puts the artifacts into the registry, and Habitat provides detailed information about the build history and state of the artifact for the operations team to use so they can deploy across any technology and infrastructure. Habitat is free and you can try it out at https://community.chef.io/tools/chef-habitat. The Habitat Builder EC2 container registry export support will be available at re:Invent.

Chef Automate available in the AWS GovCloud marketplace

And finally, we are excited to announce our participation in the Amazon public sector cloud programs. Chef’s offerings will be available in the AWS GovCloud marketplace, so government entities and intelligence agencies using Amazon’s cloud offerings can use Chef Automate inside their cloud instances. We are also partnering with AWS to deliver special training and other programs for our public sector customers.

Meet us at AWS re:Invent

If you’re attending AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, stop by and say hi to Chef! We are at the re:Invent exhibit hall in booth #224. You can get more details on these and other new goodies, and grab some fun stickers for your collection.

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Matt Carter

Matt Carter is Senior Director of Product Marketing at Chef. For 20 years Matt Carter has created end-to-end marketing and evangelism programs for companies and products in the developer and IT space, including Microsoft, Hortonworks, Shippable and TDWI. Matt is based in Seattle, WA, where he enjoys playing tennis and honing his BBQ skills. Contact Matt at mcarter@chef.io.