Chef, the leader in automation for DevOps, today introduced Dependency Management, a new feature of its Chef Delivery product, that enables faster and safer developer collaboration by allowing Chef Delivery to know which services and applications in the pipeline depend on one another. With Dependency Management, not only must changes pass local tests, but related, downstream components or services must pass those tests, as well. Only service changes that pass are promoted, so deployments to production are safe. Dependency Management enables a reliable, repeatable and scalable process for cross-team collaboration in large enterprises. It doesn’t matter if there are two developers or thousands of staff — teams can create and safely deploy interconnected services on diverse runtime environments, including containers.
Chef also today announced enhanced capabilities for Chef Compliance to enable automated management of compliance policies that are based on the broadly used Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmarks. Users can now implement CIS and other compliance policies as code, called “compliance profiles.” In addition, Chef Compliance offers an enhanced Windows experience by allowing users to import Windows policies from the Microsoft Security Compliance Manager.
By using compliance profiles in conjunction with Dependency Management, users can enforce these policies with Chef Delivery to ensure that changes to infrastructure and applications meet all requirements across the pipeline. Together these two new features enable users to easily input, track, and test service runtime dependencies. Simultaneously, users can incorporate CIS benchmarks profile into Delivery’s automated testing pipeline to create a foundation for meeting Payment Card Industry (PCI) standards.
Software is now the competitive currency of the enterprise. However, software is also becoming increasingly complex and composed of interdependent services that reside in the cloud. Businesses must be able to develop and maintain these intricate applications, along with the infrastructure that supports them, while moving at high velocity. It is critical that any changes to applications and infrastructure be versioned and tested before they are deployed to production. Because multiple teams often work on a single application, cross-team collaboration and transparency are critical to the success of a project. The DevOps workflow, which uses both culture and technology to foster these values, is becoming the most effective approach to developing software quickly and safely. Chef has distilled its customers’ successful workflow patterns into Chef Delivery, where service dependencies can be predefined and compliance requirements become part of the development pipeline. Chef Delivery eliminates silos and project segregation, enabling developers and operations personnel to begin committing code to the primary development pipeline in their first week on the team, instead of waiting weeks or even months in traditional environments.
“Enterprises need comprehensive solutions to safely implement DevOps in the push toward ever-greater development velocity. Unlike other frameworks and tools, Chef Delivery doesn’t just help you build a change management pipeline, it is the pipeline,” said Alex Ethier, vice president of product, Chef. “We’re committed to advancing our product in a way that enables developers, operations and IT to collectively manage the speed and scale of enterprise business.”
Company, Customer and Community Growth
The new product enhancements reflect Chef’s rapidly growing footprint in the enterprise. Today, more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue comes from enterprise organizations, and more than half of the Fortune 50 use Chef. Chef has tens of millions of machines under management on any given day. To date, the Chef client has been downloaded more than 27 million times, with more than 13 million client downloads in 2015 alone. Among the increased demand from the enterprise, Chef’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) grew 94 percent year-over-year in 2015.
Regionally, Chef’s EMEA business continues to rapidly expand. Q4 2015 was a record quarter for Chef EMEA, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the company’s total ARR for the quarter. Chef’s EMEA business now serves more than 150 customers and ARR for 2015 grew 91 percent year-over-year.
Chef is closing in on 1,000 customers worldwide, with Chef’s commercial offerings used by organizations including Nordstrom, Facebook, Disney, Target, Standard Bank, and Etsy.
Critical to Chef’s success is its open source community, which has more than doubled in size – at a clip of more than 100 percent year-over-year for three consecutive years – to nearly 70,000 registered members and thousands of active constituents contributing code daily. As adoption of open source technologies rise and more developers adopt Chef skills, the value of those abilities is reflected in enterprise careers. Dice recently noted that developers who cultivate Chef skills see return in a more than $130,000 annual salary.
Recently, Chef announced a new Partner Cookbook Program to allow even greater collaboration and integration for its open source community. Some of our partners include 3Scale, Alert Logic, CloudPassage, Dynatrace, Infoblox, and NetApp.
Availability
Chef Delivery’s new Dependency Management capability is now available to all current Delivery customers. Read more on accessing and utilizing this new feature. Register for a webinar demonstrating Chef Delivery with Dependency Management on April 7, at 10 am PT.
The CIS and Microsoft Security Compliance Manager profiles for Chef Compliance will be available on March 31 and demonstrated via a webinar that day at 10 am PT. Register here for this webinar and for more information on the profiles’ availability.
