Originally reported by ZDNet, May 2017. This article summarizes announcements made at ChefConf 2017.
Chef Doubles Down on Cloud-Native and Container-First DevOps
At ChefConf 2017, Chef—one of the most established names in infrastructure automation—announced a significant expansion of its flagship product, Chef Automate. The updates are designed to help enterprises move beyond traditional server- and virtual machine (VM)-based IT infrastructure toward cloud-native and container-first environments, while maintaining consistent automation and DevOps practices throughout the transition.
Background: From Configuration Management to Full DevOps Automation
Chef began as an open-source configuration management and deployment tool. Its core strength has always been the ability to define infrastructure as code, allowing DevOps teams to provision and manage dozens or hundreds of server instances programmatically rather than manually. Where traditional system administration tools were built around single, standalone servers, Chef was designed for scale from the start.
In the years since Chef’s founding, enterprise IT has shifted dramatically—from physical servers and VMs toward containers, microservices, and public cloud infrastructure. Chef Automate, introduced in 2016, represents Chef’s answer to that shift. As Chef CMO Ken Cheney explained at ChefConf 2017: “We’re helping organizations with where they are at today, but we provide a bridge to the future, showing how they can go about delivering software across those environments.”
New Capabilities Announced at ChefConf 2017
Compliance Automation with InSpec
Chef Automate now integrates directly with InSpec, Chef’s compliance automation framework. By treating compliance requirements as code, teams can embed security and compliance checks directly into their CI/CD pipelines—a practice commonly called “shifting left.” This approach allows compliance validation to happen continuously during development rather than as a late-stage gate, reducing risk and accelerating delivery.
Alongside this, Chef released three InSpec cloud integration projects in incubation:
- InSpec-AWS – Test and audit Amazon Web Services configurations directly from InSpec.
- InSpec-Azure – Interact with and audit Microsoft Azure resources via InSpec.
- InSpec-vSphere – Bring compliance-as-code to VMware vSphere environments.
These projects provide resource libraries that allow InSpec to query and validate cloud platform configurations without requiring custom tooling.
Application Automation with Habitat
Chef also previewed deeper integration between Chef Automate and Habitat, its open-source application automation project. Habitat provides a consistent way to package, build, and run applications regardless of where they are deployed—whether on legacy servers, in containers, or in cloud-native microservices architectures.
Key Habitat capabilities announced at ChefConf 2017 include:
- Habitat Scaffolding: New helper functions that enable rapid packaging of applications built with popular languages and frameworks, including Ruby on Rails and Node.js. Once packaged, apps can be exported to container runtimes such as Docker and ACI, and deployed to orchestration platforms including Kubernetes, OpenShift, and Mesosphere DC/OS.
- Enterprise-Ready Habitat Plans: An initial set of 20 curated build plans covering common enterprise scenarios across five categories:
- Big Data: Cassandra, Spark, Storm, Kafka, ZooKeeper, CrateDB
- Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana
- Middleware: WebSphere, MuleSoft, Varnish, RabbitMQ, Consul
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Shield backup
- Developer and Content Tools: Jenkins, Drupal, WordPress
- Core Package Auto-Rebuilds: Packages accepted into the Habitat core library are automatically rebuilt whenever their dependencies are updated, ensuring downstream consumers always benefit from the latest, validated versions.
Habitat Builder SaaS Platform
Chef also launched the Habitat Builder service—a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that provides a hosted environment for building, packaging, managing, and running Habitat-packaged applications. Builder integrates with the scaffolding and core plans described above, providing a central registry and build pipeline for Habitat artifacts.
Supported Cloud Platforms
The expanded Chef Automate capabilities are available across the major public cloud and virtualization platforms, including:
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) via AWS OpsWorks
- Microsoft Azure
- VMware vRealize 7
Support covers both Windows and Linux workloads across these platforms.
Context: A Competitive Landscape
Chef Automate entered a market that was already crowded with container orchestration and automation tools. Kubernetes, Mesosphere Marathon, and Docker Swarm mode were already well established by 2017. Chef’s differentiation rests on its depth in compliance automation and its ability to manage the full lifecycle of both traditional and cloud-native workloads from a single, unified platform—rather than focusing solely on container scheduling.
Summary
The ChefConf 2017 announcements represented a meaningful step in Chef’s evolution from a configuration management tool into a broader DevOps automation platform. By extending Chef Automate with native compliance-as-code (InSpec), application packaging (Habitat), and multi-cloud integrations, Chef positioned itself as a bridge between legacy infrastructure management and modern, container-driven delivery pipelines. For organizations already invested in the Chef ecosystem, these additions provide a clearer path to cloud-native operations without abandoning existing automation investments.