Earlier this year the Chef team promised there would be many opportunities to improve your knowledge of Chef, Habitat, and InSpec at #ChefConf 2018. After three days of technical workshops, inspiring keynotes, demos and community events, we can say that they delivered on that promise (and then some!).
Our DevOps team headed to the windy city bright and early to take in the scenery, as well as prepare for our session with Chef’s CTO, Adam Jacob. We spoke about how we have brought Chef’s innovative platform, Habitat, into some exciting client engagements and what Habitat means for the future of DevOps.
“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – Adam Jacob, CTO, Chef
Takeaways
The keynotes. THE KEYNOTES! They were inspiring and hit us in all the right spots. Here are some highlights from Adam Jacob and Chef CEO, Barry Crist:
- Eliminate velocity blockers. We loved the conversation on how compliance should be an innovation tactic rather than a speedbump. Yes, compliance is a velocity problem, but it shouldn’t be – let’s automate compliance and move faster.
- We need to think like a digital native, as if we all were born in the digital age.
- Adam Jacob reminded us all that “You’re not an X company, you’re a technology company.”
- The theme of the conference “do change” really came out – whether that is each of us asking ‘why not’ or ‘who said we can’t do this’ to get to the bottom of resistance. We can do change and we can get over these legacy rumors!
- And in the end, we all need to bring our Most Ambitious Self to work every day. After all, we are changing the world! (Thanks to Sue Taylor from the @gatesfoundation for inspiring us even more).
Top ChefConf 2018 Announcements
In between the live rock concerts and corned beef hash breaks, there were exciting announcements afloat that made it clear the company is focusing on more than just infrastructure and compliance but bringing automation to applications and the entire software delivery lifecycle.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the big news:
Chef Automate 2.0
The new version of Chef Automate combines the infrastructure and applications work so that enterprises can securely build, deploy and manage applications in all environments.
Automate will now have several new features and tools for better operational visibility and debugging, allowing the users to analyze infrastructure and compliance automation data from a single control panel.
Chef Workstation
Chef announced the beta availability of Chef Workstation software. Chef Workstation enables developers to execute Chef ad hoc tasks (resources, recipes, and cookbooks) directly from their development machines, without requiring the deployment of a Chef server.
Chef InSpec
Chef Compliance Automation or InSpec was updated with cloud configuration compliance, more than 30 new resources, and improved performance.
Chef Habitat
Chef Application Automation, also known as Habitat, enables teams to build, deploy and manage “any app, anywhere.”
With a focus on modernizing the application delivery, Habitat now supports a broad range of application types including an updated Kubernetes Operator. It has been integrated with Azure Container Service, Helm Chart exporter, Open Service Broker and Splunk. Habitat also now offers a generic Kubernetes operator that controls the lifecycle management of all applications controlled by the Habitat supervisor.
Until next year!
We had a legendary experience with our new Chef friends at this year’s ChefConf and have headed home to Canada to apply the many lessons learned to our operation and projects. We can hardly wait for next year’s concert… err… conference, but in the meantime will continue to work closely with our Technology Partner and assist with whatever they need!
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