Chef App Delivery is the evolution of Chef’s software configuration capabilities and redefines the way applications are delivered. While traditional code-based configuration solutions are good for managing infrastructure-as-code they are not well suited for managing service architected applications with many dependencies that are updated frequently and require quick actions like stop/start/restart.
Chef App Delivery takes a modular approach to configuration working down the stack as far as needed to package all of the components needed to run an application into a single immutable artifact. Each dependency has a plan of its own, maintained by its respective owner. Plans are stored in a single repository where they can be easily searched, shared, updated, customized, and versioned.
Once a plan is defined, the magic of Chef App delivery takes over. When an app is built, the resulting artifact contains metadata pointers for its full dependency chain. This ensures that the artifact a developer tests on their laptop remains consistent with the ones running in production, regardless of provider or platform.
With this type of detail updating, maintaining and auditing apps in production is significantly simplified.
