Chef App Delivery
Application Delivery Automation
Deliver successful application outcomes consistently at scale with Chef App Delivery.
Chef Re-Defining Application Delivery
Chef® App Delivery™ is an automation solution that enables companies to apply a technology agnostic and modular approach to defining, packaging and delivering application and infrastructure across on-prem, hybrid and cloud environments. Chef App Delivery frees DevOps teams from technical debt and antiquated processes, enabling them to deliver successful business outcomes across their entire IT estate.
Chef enables supporting app teams to:
Overcome cultural challenges with the adoption of agile delivery practices that scale across development, operations and security.
Deal with increasing complexity caused by the adoption of cloud-native architectures that add to the rising sea of dependencies while supporting existing systems.
Leverage existing investments in existing Chef software configuration assets and other DevOps tools while accelerating the adoption of modern application architectures and delivery methods.
Habitat’s growing maturity improves Chef Software’s application automation story.
Chef App Delivery Key Benefits
Increase Productivity
Save thousands of hours configuring, updating dependencies, versioning, testing and remediating apps across Dev, QA and Ops.
Eliminate Defects Earlier and Deploy Faster
Shift defect resolution from run-time to build-time and deploy to production up to 90% faster.
Reduce Operational Overhead
Standardize the way apps are delivered and reduce the number of tools, scripts, plug-ins that need to be maintained.
Chef App Delivery a Step Beyond Software Configuration and Packaging
Chef App Delivery is the evolution of Chef’s software configuration capabilities and redefines the way applications are delivered. While traditional code-based configuration solutions are good for managing infrastructure-as-code they are not well suited for managing service architected applications with many dependencies that are updated frequently and require quick actions like stop/start/restart.
Chef App Delivery takes a modular approach to configuration working down the stack as far as needed to package all of the components needed to run an application into a single immutable artifact. Each dependency has a plan of its own, maintained by its respective owner. Plans are stored in a single repository where they can be easily searched, shared, updated, customized, and versioned.
Once a plan is defined, the magic of Chef App delivery takes over. When an app is built, the resulting artifact contains metadata pointers for its full dependency chain. This ensures that the artifact a developer tests on their laptop remains consistent with the ones running in production, regardless of provider or platform.
With this type of detail updating, maintaining and auditing apps in production is significantly simplified.
One App Delivery Solution. Multiple Beneficiaries.
Chef App Delivery enables IT teams to overcome cultural barriers and improve the way teams work together to build, deploy and manage applications.
Developer Productivity
Developers get to use the technologies they are most comfortable with, while giving them on-demand access to DevTest environments and the ability to promote releases themselves.
Operational Consistency
Operations get codified tested, ready-to-go, compliant, artifacts that are consistently defined and built alongside the app and can be easily integrated with other DevOps tools.
Quality and Efficiency
QA teams no longer have to wait for environments to start testing and can receive updates when changes are made to supporting systems and see what apps are impacted.
Release Velocity
Release teams no longer have to understand each aspect of the app. They can manage deployments across environments at scale and see results in real time.
Codified & Consistent Windows Application Delivery Automation
Chef App Delivery is especially well suited for managing complex applications on Windows. Operating system level configuration concerns such as domains, firewalls and others can be managed with Chef Infra, while Chef Habitat handles the build and deployment of your applications itself. Together with Chef InSpec you can guarantee that your application has been delivered safely and securely with all the policy you’ve defined for it enforced.
Chef App Delivery Core Features
Better Apps Start with Better Definitions
Application definition is the process of creating a codified operational runbook. Chef App Delivery explicitly models, defines and isolates dependencies as code and stores them in a common codebase along with the application binaries. By identifying and defining everything an application needs to be built, run and maintained as part of the development phase, failure identification is shifted-left from run-time to build-time.
Universal Packaging and Cataloging
Application packaging continues to be one of the most ad-hoc managed processes in IT. Chef App Delivery provides a universal specification for packaging and running distributed applications. It enables application delivery teams to standardize the way the application is packaged regardless of the underpinning technology or runtime environment. Once a package is defined it is published as a signed, compressed, versioned artifact that includes everything defined in the manifest. Published artifacts are stored in a single-origin that can not be accessed by humans giving them immutability.
Multi-Environment and Multi-Channel Management
Having a unified approach to packaging greatly simplifies CI/CD processes. Release and security teams can quickly view the content of artifacts by reviewing the package contents via a GUI based UI. Using the same UI release teams can promote packages to different channels, set-up deployment patterns and even automatically roll-back a deployment when needed. Throughout the release process applications stream data to Chef Automate providing real-time visibility into an application's current running state, health, and version.
Real-Time Data and Actionable Insights
Organizations must be able to not only deliver application updates quickly, but also validate that every instance of the application was successfully updated. Chef dashboards track the status of applications holistically across all environments. With a click of the mouse, interested parties can see what applications have been updated, what the status is, where there are failures and determine whether they need to perform an automated roll-back or remediate and roll-forward.
Modernize Any Application with Advanced Run-time Capabilities
Chef allows legacy apps to be in the same way cloud-native apps are eliminating dependencies on operating systems and middleware. The Chef Habitat Supervisor is a light-weight, intelligent agent that runs on/in a server, virtual machine, or container and manages the application according to the instructions defined in the Habitat Plan. Lifecycle hooks are used to program the supervisor for advanced capabilities including dynamic service bindings, clustering topologies, service discovery, health status and many other capabilities – this enables DevOps teams to apply the same modern application management best practices they use for cloud-native applications to all of their applications.
Chef App Delivery
Chef App Delivery combines the power of open source community based software development and enterprise class support.
Chef Habitat
Developer friendly open source automation solution for defining, packaging, and delivering apps to almost any environment.
Explore Chef HabitatChef Infra
Powerful open source solution that transforms infrastructure into code and automates how infrastructure is configured, deployed, and managed across environment.
Explore Chef InfraChef Automate
Enterprise dashboard and analytics tool that enablesing cross-team collaboration with actionable insights for configuration and compliance across environments.
Explore Chef AutomateChef Enterprise Distributions
Dedicated services that include trusted, hardened, and production-ready software distributions, support, expert help, training, reporting and much more.
Explore Chef Enterprise DistributionsChef Community
Hundreds of pre-defined configuration templates built and maintained by the Chef Community.
Explore Chef Developer Community
[Edgenuity] not only wanted to accelerate our adoption of agile delivery practices but create an organization of developers that we taught to do operations and collaborate via code. Chef’s code based approach to automation enabled us to do this and now sits as the foundation that everything else is built upon including our core applications, services, containers, etc.
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