Chef Automate with InSpec
Chef Automate now comes with InSpec compliance monitoring integrated into the dashboard. (Click for larger version.)

Not quite a year after launching Chef Automate, cloud-based software development company Chef has improved support for InSpec and Habitat — its code testing and app building projects — within its flagship product as it kicks off ChefConf 2017.

Seattle-based Chef helps companies developing applications on cloud services or across hybrid cloud environments to build, manage and deploy those applications with its Chef Automate product. The company is expected to announce tighter integration between its InSpec and Habitat open-source projects and Chef Automate in Austin on Tuesday.

“We’re helping organizations with where they are at today, but we provide a bridge to the future, (showing) how they can go about delivering software across those environments,” said Ken Cheney, chief marketing officer at Chef, in an interview prior to ChefCon.

Chef Automate users can now use InSpec’s technology directly in their regular workflow to ensure that applications developed in Chef Automate are adhering to compliance and security rules. Habitat, an open-source project for deploying apps across on-premise and cloud environments, is also now part of the Chef Automate dashboard.

Several new features have also been added to both open-source projects. InSpec can now assess compliance of applications running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and VMware vSphere, part of Chef’s strategy of bridging older computing environments and newer ones. And Habitat now supports additional tools for packaging apps in containers and for deploying packaged apps across platforms for big data analysis, middleware, or databases.

As older companies struggle with the reality of moving older applications to cloud services, they turn to companies like Chef and rival Puppet for tools to help them take advantage of modern development practices without breaking everything in the process. Like a lot of enterprise computing companies, Chef is attempting to commercialize a product (Chef Automate) atop an open-source project; in this case, three projects, including the flagship Chef project.

Chef’s Nell Shamrell-Harrington will be at our GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit in June explaining the history of DevOps and its future.

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