This is a guest post from our friend Doug Ireton at Nordstrom, detailing key information about the transfer of ownership for Chef-Vault from the Nordstrom team to Chef.
# What is chef-vault?
Chef-Vault is a tool to help engineers securely manage passwords, SSL certs, and other secrets in Chef Recipes. Originally developed by Nordstrom during a consulting engagement with Chef 2 1/2 years ago, it has been in production use at Nordstrom and other companies ever since. It currently ships in the ChefDK.
In order to ensure a healthy future for Chef-Vault, Nordstrom will be turning over ownership of the open source project to Chef. Chef has moved the chef-vault repo on GitHub to the Chef organization.
# Why is Nordstrom turning over Chef-Vault?
Chef-Vault has grown bigger than Nordstrom and we want to make sure that it’s able to thrive and grow with the needs of the community. Over the last few months, we haven’t been able to give Chef-Vault the attention it deserves. We still use Chef-Vault every day and plan to continue contributing code to the project and are very thankful for each person who contributed code, issues, and docs over the last 2 1/2 years.
At the end of October, we approached Chef to see if they were willing to take over ownership of Chef-Vault. They accepted and will maintain Chef-Vault going forward.
# What are Chef’s plans for Chef-Vault?
Chef is committed to ensuring that Chef-Vault remains a high quality component of the ChefDK. We’re incredibly grateful to Nordstrom for contributing a crucial piece of software to our community and will continue to support and maintain Chef-Vault in the future.