UPDATED 12:40 EDT / JULY 12 2016

NEWS

Chef’s new flagship DevOps platform aims to automate the entire application lifecycle

After a fairly uneventful first day at Chef Software Inc.’s user conference in Austin this week, the show is kicking into high gear. The company announced a new flagship offering called Chef Automate this morning that combines all of its standalone application automation tools into a single integrated platform.

Creating all-in-one product suites has emerged as a popular monetization strategy among open-source DevOps providers in recent quarters. Docker Inc. made its flagship container engine and complementary automation tools available in a single commercial bundle a few months ago, and HashiCorp Inc. pulled a similar gambit last July. The latter’s offering includes no fewer than seven separate applications. But while they focus on different areas, the two startups and Chef share the same basic value proposition: An integrated platform is typically more convenient to use than a set of disjointed point solutions.

In Chef Automate, that convenience is provided by a monitoring console called Visibility that enables organizations to centrally track all of their application operations. The dashboard can display most of everything from the status of a company’s development and testing environment to its production workloads. It’s even capable of showing the progress of updates and new application rollouts thanks to a specialized change tracking feature. The latter capability is designed to help administrators quickly identify technical problems like failed patches that need to be resolved fast.

The code rollout itself, meanwhile, is handled by a continuous delivery tool previously known as Chef Delivery that has also been bundled into the new suite. It’s helpfully paired with a compliance enforcement system that lets organizations ensure their developers follow internal security procedures. A bank, for instance, can use the software to automatically prevent an update from rolling out to its mobile app if the code doesn’t live up to the financial industry’s PCI DSS standard. Moreover, the tool also lets users find pre-existing compliance violations in their infrastructure thanks to a built-in scanner that visualizes problems similarly to the Visibility monitoring dashboard.

Chef Automate is available immediately for $137 per node per year.

Image via Pixabay

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