In today’s new era of technology, businesses are constantly wrestling with the challenges of digital transformation and the disruption it has created in various industries.
In an interview with SourceForge, Chef’s Vice President of Marketing Marc Holmes, discusses how continuous automation (CA) can help organizations manage the sometimes opposing forces at work during digital disruptions. Holmes outlined the benefits of using continuous automation for IT and shares how this approach to building, deploying, and managing software can help businesses employ cloud-based and on-premises apps and infrastructure, and also aid in expediting the delivery of software across various environments. He also shared some insights on how Chef Automate can help information technology (IT) teams and businesses to manage their infrastructure, applications, and compliance concerns with consistency and efficiency.
Why Businesses Should Embrace Continuous Automation
The digital revolution continues to change the IT and communication landscapes. As businesses begin to embrace digital transformation, companies must adopt automation to both stay competitive and achieve cloud-scale for their applications. However, the complexity of managing a combination of cloud-native applications, microservices, container solutions, and legacy technologies makes it difficult for a business to move software from development environments into production. Balancing out agility with managing complexity is essential to successfully delivering a seamless, integrated experience to your customer base.
This is where continuous automation comes in. Automating the delivery and management of applications allows companies to balance speed and reliability across a variety of hybrid application environments. Automating tasks shifts a team’s focus from identifying and solving rote configuration and compliance problems and instead allows them to focus on delivering more value to customers at a rapid cadence.
Continuous Automation, Defined
Continuous automation (CA) is defined as a practice of automating every aspect of an application’s lifecycle to build and deploy software and changes quickly, consistently, and safely. This approach integrates automation of applications, infrastructure, and compliances, and redefines elements as code to make it easier for an organization to test conditions, management multiple versions, apply changes when needed, and scale at will.
Marc Holmes, the Vice President of Marketing at Chef
“Google’s Kelsey Hightower has referred to Automation as “…the source code serialization of ideas’,” said Holmes. “What we see fundamentally is that automation is delivering value by getting experiences into the hands of customers more quickly, with increased efficiency, while simultaneously decreasing risk.” Hence, for teams that continue to struggle with process issues, using continuous automation will help them simplify their workloads and speed up the delivery of software.
Additionally, continuous automation reduces the pain of deployment for businesses. “Enterprise architecture is expanding along dimensions of diversity (servers to devices), density (bare metal to containers), and distribution (monoliths to microservices) as every business is shifting to the cloud as well as containers, apps, and this results in a hybrid architecture,” said Holmes. “These heterogenous environments offer huge benefits of scale and new services, but also bring the challenge of yet another thing for a team to manage. Managing these environments means thinking about DevOps, data, and moving parts of all the things, all the time (especially published data).”
With continuous automation, businesses are able to deliver optimized Agile, Lean, and DevOps (ALDO) processes and consistent infrastructure, application, and compliance automation regardless of the IT environment. And applying DevOps and automation means teams and businesses can efficiently improve their operation workflows and deploy applications quickly, efficiently, and with minimum risks.
The Benefits of Continuous Automation
One of the most common sources of tension in an organization lies between the goals of the business teams (who want to provide more value faster) and IT organizations (who are goaled by system reliability and security). One of the key advantages to businesses who adopt continuous automation is the capability to break down silos and enable their teams to work together to improve their operational efficiency. With continuous automation, operations teams can transform from being a barrier to an enabler of reliable and efficient application delivery. “We call these ‘Developer Services’ teams”, said Holmes. “These teams enable organizations to develop, deploy, and deliver features frequently and securely.”
Ops teams who transform into a Developer Services practice provide these key features and functions to organizations:
- Offering on-demand, self-service infrastructure, and services that are tailored to a developer’s needs.
- Controlling and cutting costs of running, configuring, and maintaining infrastructure.
- Allowing development teams to speed up the delivery of software while maintaining quality and lowering risk.
- Managing changes to infrastructure requirements in a reliable way.
- Reducing risk to my organization from my infrastructure and software that runs on it
- Helping development teams to get insights into efficiency, speed, and risk of delivery of their software.
- Lowering friction by allowing full stack transparency and management capability with separation of duties,
- Providing configured infrastructure and handling of responsibility to development teams.
Chef Open Source Tools for Continuous Automation
Being a change agent of digital transformation, Chef takes full advantage of open source engines to develop the company’s continuous automation platform. Chef’s continuous automation solution is built on three open source engines: Chef (for infrastructure automation), InSpec (for compliance automation), and Habitat (for application delivery automation).
“Open source has come to affect everything on every level over the past few years,” said Holmes. By using an open source software that lets IT teams integrate real-time data as well as search and analytics applications, businesses can enhance the digital experience for their customers and employees.
Redefining Business Processes with Chef Automate
A lack of centralized automation can hinder the continuous flow of processes in DevOps. To enable developer teams to efficiently create workflows and to manage compliance for both cloud-native and legacy applications, it is crucial to have a centralized and application-centric Continuous Automation Platform like Chef Automate.
As the leading platform for continuous automation, Chef Automate helps support any environment, from apps running in the data center to contain-based microservices in the cloud. Chef Automate helps developers build, deploy, manage, and collaborate across all aspects of software production, which include infrastructure, applications, and compliance. Each of these capabilities supports the right processes to help simplify operations and achieve business growth.
- Build. Chef Automate helps developers create code for production use. Packaging code into a reusable artifact enables developers to test, approve, and promote the use of an atomic change that prevents configuration drift and delivers consistency across multiple environments.
- Deploy. This continuous automation platform establishes standard workflows that use deployment pipelines, giving Operations and Developer teams a common platform. These deployment pipelines increase the efficiency and speed of an organization’s software deployment by removing manual processes and simplifying the number of variables.
- Manage. Chef Automate enables an organization to ensure security and compliance requirements and visualizes fleetwide status to resolve issues and errors easily and quickly.
- Collaborate. Chef Automate offers tools for several integration points including software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) in addition to deployment pipelines that support operational workflows. Developers have the ability to validate their code on non-critical systems using fast feedback loops to capture and identify issues at an earlier time.
Chef Rolls Out New Compliance and Application Automation Capabilities for AWS
In keeping with the company’s goal to provide users with the most complete automation capabilities and to enable organizations to deliver software faster, more efficiently, and with less risk, last year, Chef partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver OpsWorks for Chef Automate, bring Chef capabilities as a service to AWS customers. These new capabilities further accelerate enterprise adoption of AWS by resolving issues pertaining to compliance and containerized application lifecycle.
Providing a fully-managed Chef server and suite of automation tools, OpsWorks for Chef Automate allows users seamless workflow automation for continuous deployment and automated testing for compliance and security. Chef has recently announced New support for AWS that enable users to experience easy automation and workload migration to Amazon EC2 with Habitat Builder; to monitor and manage the entire infrastructure for compliance issues and security risks with compliance-as-code solution in OpsWorks for Chef Automate; and making Chef Automate available through the AWS GovCloud Marketplace and AWS Marketplace for the US Intelligence Community.
For further information on OpsWorks for Chef Automate, visit AWS and Chef Automate.
Bottom Line
To improve operational efficiency and achieve business growth, organizations need to adopt the technologies that enable them to deliver software swiftly and make the overall process to run smoothly, efficiently, and with minimum risks. With continuous automation, IT teams can focus on building, deploying, and managing cloud-based solutions and legacy applications in any type of environment and move software through different environments quickly. As a result, businesses can deliver software faster to their customer base with minimal risks and fewer headaches.
About Chef
Chef is the leading provider of Continuous Automation software and one of the founders of the DevOps movement that aims to “help the most enduring and transformative companies to become fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations”. Headquartered in Seattle, Washington, Chef helps businesses embrace digital transformation by offering the best practices and platforms to deliver software at speed. The company works with thousands of organizations across the world, delivering open-source software engines that include Habitat for applications, Chef for infrastructure, and InSpec for compliance.