Progress Announces The Release of Chef Enterprise Automation Stack and Chef Infra Client 17

Progress announced the availability of enhancements to the Chef® Enterprise Automation Stack and the new release of Chef® Infra™ Client 17. Progress also announced a new recognition program for Chef Community contributors. The General Manager, Chef Business, at Progress Sundar Subramanian said:

“Today’s release not only builds on our commitment to drive innovation to the Chef community but also on our vision of delivering a unified and scalable platform that accelerates the rate in which enterprise DevSecOps can deliver changes in hybrid-cloud, regulated and edge computing environments,”

The latest release of the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS) is designed to bring together familiar elements of the Chef ecosystem into a more integrated automation solution. Chef EAS gives DevSecOps teams scalable patterns they can use to minimize the effort needed to implement complex solutions, enables full-stack visibility across heterogeneous infrastructure and applications, and unifies the experience for developers, operators, and administrators.

The new features in EAS include:

Chef Infra Compliance Phase: Enables Chef® InSpec® users to automatically execute compliance audits as part of any Chef Infra Client run.
Chef Infra State Management Dashboards: Allows users to view and manage Chef Infra Server details in Chef® Automate™.
Unified Developer Experience: Chef® Workstation™ now includes the Chef® Habitat® CLI, giving Chef developers all the tools needed to get started with Chef EAS in one easy-to-install package.

The new release builds upon Progress’ efforts to make Chef easier to use for a wider range of audiences and use cases. Chef Infra Client 17 comes equipped with a number of new pre-built resources, helpers and cookbooks created by both the Chef and the Chef Community. Chef Infra Client 17 will be generally available on April 28.

New features in Chef Infra Client 17 deliver:

Streamlined Developer Experiences: Improvements to Chef Workstation, cloud integrations, hypervisor support, and system architectures to ensure fewer challenges for developers in the coding process.
Increased Platform Coverage and Support: Expanded coverage and support for ARM in the cloud, macOS Big Sur, the Apple M1 architecture, Windows 8 and PowerShell Core.
Improved Cloud Detection, Security and Data Aggregation: New, more secure AWS metadata for better data gathering for cloud instances. Improved and more intelligent Azure data gathering allows users to manage systems based on more environmental variables.

A new program designed to acknowledge Chef Community contributors, the program includes personal recognition from the Progress Management Team, in addition to participation in an annual Chef Community event.