This article is based on announcements made at ChefConf 2018 and reporting originally published on devops.com (May 2018).
Chef Bets on Microservices at ChefConf 2018
At ChefConf 2018, Chef made a series of significant product announcements aimed squarely at organizations navigating the shift to containers, Kubernetes, and multi-cloud infrastructure. The common thread across all announcements was a move toward microservices-based architectures, broader cloud-provider support, and tighter compliance automation — reflecting the growing complexity DevOps teams face as they scale.
Chef Automate 2.0: Rebuilt in Go on a Microservices Architecture
The headline announcement was Chef Automate 2.0, a ground-up rewrite of the Chef Automate platform using the Go programming language. The motivation behind the rewrite was performance and scalability — Go’s concurrency model and smaller runtime footprint make it a common choice for infrastructure tooling that needs to handle high request volumes efficiently.
By moving to a microservices architecture, Chef Automate 2.0 gains several practical benefits:
- REST API-driven UI: The new user interface is built on top of a REST API, which simultaneously powers the UI and enables third-party integrations — a clean separation of concerns that makes the platform easier to extend.
- Streaming event feed: Operators can monitor infrastructure events in real time, reducing the lag between a change occurring and it being visible in the dashboard.
- Trend graphs and a query language: Built-in visibility tools help teams investigate drift, failures, and compliance status without reaching for external analytics tooling.
- Improved debugging tools: The platform bundles debugging capabilities directly, reducing the need to correlate logs across separate systems.
Chef Workstation: Agentless Local Automation
Chef also introduced Chef Workstation, a developer-focused tool that lets members of a DevOps team run IT automation tasks directly from a local workstation — without installing agents on target systems. This lowers the barrier for developers who want to use Chef’s automation capabilities for ad-hoc tasks or testing without provisioning a full Chef environment. Agentless operation is particularly useful for managing existing infrastructure that cannot easily have software installed on it.
Habitat Updates: Kubernetes, Azure, Helm, and Splunk
Chef’s application release automation tool, Habitat, received a broad set of updates targeting modern container and cloud-native workflows:
- Kubernetes Operator for Habitat: Allows Habitat-packaged applications to be managed natively within Kubernetes, using the Operator pattern to handle application lifecycle events.
- Open Service Broker support: Integration with the Open Service Broker API (originally developed by the Cloud Foundry Foundation) enables Habitat applications to consume platform services in a standardized way.
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) export: Teams can export Habitat build artifacts directly to AKS, streamlining deployment to Microsoft’s managed Kubernetes offering.
- Helm chart exporter: Habitat can now generate Helm charts for Kubernetes clusters, making it easier to integrate Habitat-built applications into Helm-based deployment workflows.
- Splunk integration: Operational analytics data from Habitat can be forwarded to Splunk, giving operations teams visibility into application behavior within existing monitoring pipelines.
- On-premises edition: In addition to its SaaS offering, Habitat is now available for on-premises deployment, addressing organizations with data residency or air-gap requirements.
InSpec Updates: Multi-Cloud Compliance and Agentless Network Device Support
InSpec, Chef’s open-source compliance automation framework, also saw meaningful updates. Key additions include:
- AWS and Azure policy verification: InSpec can now audit cloud infrastructure policies directly against AWS and Microsoft Azure, enabling compliance-as-code across cloud environments.
- Google Cloud Platform (beta): GCP support was announced in beta at the time of the conference.
- 30+ new resources: The resource library expanded significantly, including support for Cisco IOS network devices as agentless targets — extending compliance automation beyond servers into network infrastructure.
Chef cited InSpec performance improvements of 90 percent on Windows and 30 percent on Linux compared to the previous version.
Industry Context: Container Adoption and the Automation Gap
Julian Dunn, then Director of Product Marketing at Chef, used the conference to frame the product announcements within broader industry trends. Chef commissioned Dimensional Research to survey 347 application and operations professionals, and the findings highlighted a significant gap between container adoption intent and actual production deployment:
- 51 percent of respondents had fewer than 10 percent of their production applications running in containers at the time of the survey.
- 46 percent expected that by 2020 more than a quarter of their applications would be containerized.
- 45 percent anticipated that at least a quarter of their application deployments would be based on microservices by 2020.
- Just over half (53 percent) reported using both infrastructure and application automation as part of their DevOps practice.
Dunn’s argument was straightforward: as organizations accelerate container adoption and tackle lift-and-shift migrations to public cloud while simultaneously building new cloud-native applications, the complexity of managing that infrastructure grows faster than teams can handle manually. IT automation frameworks become load-bearing infrastructure in that environment — not optional tooling.
The Bigger Picture: A Competitive IT Automation Market
The ChefConf 2018 announcements reflect a deliberate strategic positioning. Chef was making the case that a comprehensive automation platform — one that spans infrastructure configuration, application release management, and compliance — built on modern architectural foundations (microservices, REST APIs, Go) is better suited to the complexity of contemporary IT environments than narrower point tools.
At the time, Chef competed in a crowded space alongside Ansible, Puppet, SaltStack, and an emerging set of cloud-native tooling. The bet Chef was making was that breadth of coverage combined with architectural modernization would differentiate the platform as organizations moved from managing a few hundred servers to orchestrating thousands of containers across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
For DevOps engineers evaluating automation tooling, the practical takeaway from these announcements was clear: Chef was investing heavily in compliance-as-code (InSpec), cloud-native application packaging (Habitat), and a modern observability layer (Automate 2.0) — all areas where the gap between what teams needed and what older tooling provided was widening.