What is Chef?
Chef Automate is an enterprise platform that allows developers, operations and security engineers to collaborate effortlessly on delivering application & infrastructure changes at the speed of business. Chef Automate provides actionable insights into the state of your compliance, configurations, with an auditable history of every change that’s been applied to your environments.
Chef is an automation company. Ever since it was founded in 2008, we’ve been bringing together developers and system administrators with our namesake product, Chef. Over the years, what we mean by automation has expanded. Today, Chef has a complete automation solution for both infrastructure and applications that takes you all the way from development to production. Here’s the complete Chef solution.
The benefits of Continuous Automation
Chef aims to solve automation across the enterprise IT estate, and across functional roles, to provide an environment where a business can build, deploy, and manage any software, anywhere. This state of ‘continuous automation’ delivers on huge ROI benefits across multiple modes of automation.
These fundamental changes in time to deliver software offer immediate ROI based on the cost of supporting the enterprise IT estate, but also offer new opportunities to thrive: delivering software as a primary customer interface and channel to revenue.
Chef Automate platform supports all of these modes of automation as a complete platform for continuous automation.
A single source of truth for all your environments
Chef Automate provides filterable dashboards collecting configuration and compliance details for every datacenter, cloud provider, and environment you manage in aggregated dashboards.
Collaborate Effortlessly Between Teams
Your organization’s development, operations, security, and compliance teams are all responsible for ensuring you deliver software safely and efficiently, and with Chef Automate all stakeholders can share a consistent view of how your environments are built and validated.
Powerful Auditing Capabilities
Chef Automate lets you create agentless compliance scans directly in the Web UI. Scan traditional servers, VMs, cloud instances, and SaaS solutions all in one place
Intelligent Access Controls
Chef Automate integrates with LDAP and SAML based authentication so you can ensure the right teams have the right access using your existing access control solutions.
Built-In Compliance Assets
The Chef Automate asset store comes with a library of precreated InSpec profiles for validating software patches, system security, and evaluation against industry-standard frameworks like the CIS Benchmarks and DISA STIGs.
Actionable Insights at Any Scale
The release of Chef Automate 2.0 brings with it a modernized architecture for the Automate Server, providing the most responsive, intuitive Automate experience yet!
How You Automate Everything in the Stack
Maintain Operational Visibility
Dig into the causes of compliance failures or configuration errors across your entire fleet, or filtered by the systems that matter most. Use Chef Automate’s trend graphs, rich query language and other sophisticated interfaces to quickly sift through the noise and prioritize solutions.
Detect and Respond in Real-Time
Get a real-time view of all changes happening in your environment, whether user- or machine-initiated. See how configuration and compliance policy changes impact each other over time. Get notified immediately by chat or webhook of any failures.
Quickly Audit Configuration & Compliance History
Examine past failures and trends to identify areas for targeted process improvement. Use reports to satisfy auditors’ questions about current and historical compliance.
Scan More than Just Servers
Use Automate’s built-in InSpec-based scanner to scan both individual machines and cloud APIs for policy conformance without installing any agents. Use one of Automate’s 90+ built-in compliance baselines to get started quickly with evaluating and correcting your fleet’s security posture.
Integrate with Chef’s Open Source Projects
Automate is powered by Chef’s three open-source engines: Chef for infrastructure automation, Habitat for application automation, and InSpec for compliance and security automation. You can integrate Automate with any or all of these open-source tools to consolidate their data for actionable insights.
Reference:
What is Chef?
https://www.chef.io/chef/
Install Automation Chef
https://automate.chef.io/docs/quickstart/