Configuration Management Automation Software - Chef Infra | Chef

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Powerful Policy-Based Configuration Management Automation Software for DevOps Teams

Chef Infra configuration management software eliminates manual efforts and ensures infrastructure remains consistent and compliant over its lifetime -- even in the most complex, heterogenous, and large-scale environments.

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Configuration Automation

Confidence Through Code

Define configurations and policies as code that are testable, enforceable and can be delivered at scale as part of automated pipelines.

Drift Elimination

Ensure configurations only change if a system diverges from the desired defined state and automatically correct configuration drift, if needed.

Manage Disparate Systems as One

Manage Windows and Linux systems running on prem, ARM systems running in the cloud or Macs laptops running at the edge all the same way.

Extreme Flexibility

Use simple declarative definitions for common tasks or easily extend them to support the most unique environmental requirements.

Industry Leading Configuration Management Automation for Windows, Linux, Mac and more

Chef Infra is a configuration management tool for defining infrastructure as code (IAC), making the process of managing configurations and system state automated and testable. Unlike other configuration solutions, Chef Infra takes a policy-based approach that builds upon the principles of test-driven development and idempotency. System configuration and application change testing can be done in parallel, so system states are easily enforced and monitored across all infrastructure and teams. With Chef Infra, users define configurations once and then can apply them across mixed fleets of Linux, Mac and Windows systems, regardless of OS version and architecture.

Chef Infra Policy-Based Configuration Management Automation Architecture

Today, there isn’t a company out there that doesn't worry about security, but traditional infrastructure as code (IAC) approaches no longer scale to meet the needs of modern security-minded organizations. Traditional approaches to IAC fail to:

Account for regulatory or business security and compliance needs
Account for collaboration between application, infrastructure and security/compliance teams
Allow organizations to maintain velocity with security

Using Chef to automate configuration management allows DevOps teams to define policies that are repeatable, consistent and reusable. The result is increased business agility and security because all systems and resources are continuously and automatically evaluated, corrected, and modified.

Create and test policies

System State Enforcement

Data Aggregation and Validation

Chef Workstation

Reduce risks by iterating on policy changes before pushing them to production.

Chef Infra Client

Enforce policy by converging the system to the state declared by the various resources.

Chef Automate

View and validate intended and actual state across all systems.

Create and test policies

Chef Workstation

Reduce risks by iterating on policy changes before pushing them to production.

System State Enforcement

Chef Infra Client

Enforce policy by converging the system to the state declared by the various resources.

Data Aggregation and Validation

Chef Automate

View and validate intended and actual state across all systems.

Develop and Test
System State Enforcement
Data Aggregation and Validation

Chef Workstation: Everything You Need to Create and Test Policy-Based Configuration Management Automation

Chef Workstation gives users all the tools they need to get started with Chef all in one easy-to-install package. Users can execute ad-hoc remote configuration tasks, perform remote scanning, create cookbooks, test software and dependencies and much more. Chef Workstation provides a local developer experience and can be run on Linux, Mac laptops, or Windows systems.

Chef Workstation includes:

Chef Tools: Chef Infra Client, Chef InSpec and Chef Habitat
Chef Language: Pre-built resources for managing systems as well as helpers to make authoring and distributing cookbooks easy
Testing and Upgrade Tools: Test Kitchen, Chef Cookstyle and Chef Upgrade Lab

Chef Workstation Installation Screenshot showing included products - Chef Workstation App, Chef Infra Client, Chef InSpec, Chef Command Line Tool, Test Kitchen, Cookstyle, Ad-hoc remove execution with chef-run, Various Test Kitchen and Knifeplugins for Clouds

Whether applying existing policies from the Chef Supermarket, the Chef community or writing customized policies, Chef Workstation ensures users have everything they need to get up and running quickly.

Create Configuration Policies: Chef Cookbooks and Recipes

A Chef Infra Cookbook is the fundamental unit of configuration and policy automation distribution. Cookbooks are used to describe the system resources under management, such as files, templates, and software packages. Resources are defined in Chef Infra recipes that describe in human-readable code the desired state of each system. The code describes the desired state and then the Chef Infra Client automatically configures the system.

Chef nginx Cookbook: https://supermarket.chef.io/cookbooks/nginx

Test Configuration Policies: Test Kitchen, Chef Cookstyle and Chef InSpec

Workstation includes a number of testing tools, including Chef InSpec, that help shorten deployment cycles and inform development decisions as you build out and refine your cookbooks.

Test Kitchen is an open source testing framework that tests cookbooks using Vagrant, Docker, VMware vSphere, or leading cloud providers.
Chef Cookstyle is a code analysis tool that helps users write better Chef Infra cookbooks by detecting issues and automatically correcting cookbook code.
Chef InSpec is a compliance testing solution that defines policies as code and provides continuous visibility into compliance status across all systems and teams. Test Kitchen InSpec tests can be run against a converged cookbook for easy local infrastructure validation.

Why Customers Choose Chef for Configuration Management

Easy to Get Started with Chef Resources, Helpers and Community

With the Chef Language users define configurations once and then can apply them across mixed fleets of Linux, Mac and Windows systems, regardless of OS version and architecture. The Chef Infra language also includes a comprehensive set of pre-built resources, helpers and cookbooks created by both Chef and the Chef Community.

Resources: Resources are used for configuring components such as packages, files, directories, or firewalls. Today, Chef Infra Client ships with more than 150 resources for common automation tasks such as user, file, kernel_module and windows_task.
Helpers: Helpers enable users to make configuration decisions based on operating systems, clouds, virtualization hypervisors, and more.
Chef Community: The Chef community has created thousands of freely available configuration templates (cookbooks), for Chef Infra, that can be used as-is or as the base for an organization’s own configurations.

Agile Test-Driven Development Practices

When it comes to test-driven infrastructure, Chef wrote the book on it. Chef helped pioneer the DevOps principles and test-driven infrastructure practices that today’s agile-based delivery teams use to test and deploy systems across their entire IT estates, from smart devices running on the edge to on-premises servers to sophisticated workloads running in the cloud.

Immutable Deployments

An important part of DevOps deployments is ensuring everything runs as it should in development, test and production environments. Policyfiles ensure that the Chef Cookbooks running in production are the same versions that were tested in development. Because policies are immutable and cannot be changed once bundled, the Chef Infra Client no longer recalculates dependency sets at the start of each run, and cookbook authors no longer have to worry about their configurations changing out from under them.

Resources

Case Study

Intility: Driving IT Agility and Increased Business with Scalable and Consistent Infrastructure Automation

Case Study

Blog

Chef Infra Best Practices: #2 Serve-up Continuous Compliance with Chef Infra Compliance Phase

Blog

Test Your Chef Knowledge with the Chef Principles Certification

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Application Delivery

DevOps and Integrations

Chef Infra

Powerful Policy-Based Configuration Management Automation Software for DevOps Teams

Configuration Automation

Confidence Through Code

Drift Elimination

Manage Disparate Systems as One

Extreme Flexibility

Industry Leading Configuration Management Automation for Windows, Linux, Mac and more

Chef Infra Policy-Based Configuration Management Automation Architecture

Create and test policies

System State Enforcement

Data Aggregation and Validation

Chef Workstation

Chef Infra Client

Chef Automate

Create and test policies

Chef Workstation

System State Enforcement

Chef Infra Client

Data Aggregation and Validation

Chef Automate

Chef Workstation: Everything You Need to Create and Test Policy-Based Configuration Management Automation

Create Configuration Policies: Chef Cookbooks and Recipes

Test Configuration Policies: Test Kitchen, Chef Cookstyle and Chef InSpec

Easy to Get Started with Chef Resources, Helpers and Community

Agile Test-Driven Development Practices

Immutable Deployments

Resources

Intility: Driving IT Agility and Increased Business with Scalable and Consistent Infrastructure Automation

Chef Infra Best Practices: #2 Serve-up Continuous Compliance with Chef Infra Compliance Phase

Test Your Chef Knowledge with the Chef Principles Certification

Company

Using Chef

Legal

Contact Us

Chef Infra Best Practices: #2 Serve-up Continuous Compliance with Chef Infra Compliance Phase