Chef has been a pioneer in strengthening the DevOps journey of numerous organizations across the globe for more than a decade. ITOps and security teams across industries have efficiently handled their infrastructure and compliance management automation
requirements using Chef’s continuously improving and robust automation engine.
What started once as an infrastructure automation solution aimed to cater to underappreciated system administrators' needs has evolved over the years into a comprehensive solution that has become the mainstay of organizations to meet infrastructure automation, application deployment, and compliance management objectives.
In its constant endeavor to make DevOps better for the DevOps practitioner, Chef continues to bridge the gap between development, IT operations, and security teams with new enhancements and updates year after year.
Continuing this trend, we now bring you Chef SaaS – all your favorite Chef tools, on the cloud.
With Chef SaaS, you get seamless configuration and deployment, continuous compliance audits and automated remediation. Chef SaaS saves time and effort by taking care of the setup and deployment of Chef, allowing ITOps teams to focus on accelerating time-to-value and innovation. Also, it includes a version of Chef Automate that brings the Policy-as-Code approach to the cloud with Chef Infra and Chef Compliance.
All the Chef capabilities you need, from infrastructure management, compliance audits, access controls, and performance metrics to fleet-wide visibility, are now available from a single Chef Automate console on the cloud.
Why Chef on the Cloud?
When you use Chef SaaS, everything you need for your infrastructure management, compliance management and cloud security posture is hosted by Chef. This means you can use on-demand DevOps based on your fleet size, compliance runs and remediation profiles. Moreover, you can scale up your fleet without adding more infrastructure to your data centers.
The capital expenses of setting up the infrastructure are minimal since Chef manages your systems; your data is backed up and safe with any-time access capabilities. In addition, there is flexibility to make changes, provision new systems and configure compliance runs. Also, there is no cost of maintenance and enhancements since everything gets taken care of by Chef. For organizations continuously growing and implementing more recent and better expansion strategies, Chef SaaS is an ideal solution to get work done faster with minimum overhead.
Additionally, when you sign up, Chef SaaS configures an Automate instance, enabling you to get started with your preferences. Chef then immediately integrates with your IT ecosystem, allowing you to define your infrastructure configuration and compliance policies for the entire IT fleet. Since configurations are pre-defined as policies, provisioning is instant as the need to install and configure Chef on on-premises servers is eliminated.
Policy as Code with Chef SaaS
Chef’s ‘Policy as Code’ approach has changed how organizations configure infrastructure and define compliance policies. It brings configuration management and compliance under a single umbrella, moving all processes and collaborators into a shared process pipeline.
When infrastructure configurations and compliance postures are defined as policies in an easy-to-learn, human-readable language that can be used across teams for unified understanding, then provisioning, deployment, auditing and remediation processes become faster, and infrastructure becomes more secure and compliant.
The benefits of using Policy as Code are many:
- Since code is a common denominator for developers, operations and security teams, it increases team collaboration.
- The more complex the infrastructure is, the easier it is to scale it with code.
- Continuous security audits with code allow security to be shifted left in the development process resulting in preemptive mitigation and eliminating risks.
- Updating and sharing policies is easier when it is through code.
- Policy as code provides transparency and a view of what is happening in real-time within systems.
- It also helps in better version control and reverting to versions in case of issues.
- Finally, it gives enterprises accelerated time-to-market vis-à-vis a manual approach to configuration and compliance remediation.
Chef SaaS uses Policy-as-Code to provide the following capabilities for its users:
Infrastructure Management
Chef SaaS uses Infrastructure-as-a-Code to describe, automate and test configurations and system state. It provides automated management of infrastructure configurations across multi-OS (Windows, Linux, MacOS) systems with speed and consistency while also providing automated remediation of configuration drifts.
Compliance Management
In this deployment model, Chef provides comprehensive compliance audits based on DISA STIG and CIS benchmarks of all IT resources across cloud, on-prem, VMs and containers. Moreover, Chef SaaS also provides customizable pre-packaged remedial information to meet enterprise-specific requirements and automated remediation of security and compliance vulnerabilities.
Cloud Security Management
Chef SaaS also detects misconfigurations and maintains compliance and governance on multi-cloud accounts and container environments with standards-based audits. In addition, it scans, monitors and remediates configuration issues across multi-cloud versions, on-prem and cloud-native domains. With Chef SaaS, users can fine-tune baselines to adapt to the organization’s requirements and maintain visibility and control across hybrid environments.
While organizations continue to employ heterogeneous IT resources, the need for a unified solution to manage the diverse resources in the fleet becomes more critical. Chef SaaS, therefore, serves as an ideal automation tool for IT fleet management with insights into configuration and compliance status.
Sign up and get started with a few simple steps. Expand as your fleet scales and experience massive cost savings. Focus on meaningful tasks while Chef gets your systems ready for work.
Cost-effective, highly scalable and easy to operate, Chef SaaS offers numerous benefits to DevOps and Security teams:
- Infrastructure automation for heterogenous IT fleets ensuring consistency of configurations across the board.
- Continuous audits to detect non-compliant devices in the network.
- Automatic remediation of security vulnerabilities and non-compliant devices with built-in industry-standard CIS benchmarks and DISA STIGs.
- Total visibility into configuration status and compliance posture of all devices in the fleet, irrespective of the hosted environment.
- Faster and secure processes that save time and allow teams to focus on other creative and productive tasks.
As cloud computing continues to grow in popularity and offers the promise of flexibility, agility, scalability, and reduced costs, organizations are rapidly transitioning their infrastructure and applications towards a ‘cloud-only’ or a hybrid model. Chef offers Chef SaaS for the benefit of DevOps and security teams for infrastructure and compliance automation, with the added benefits of being on the cloud!