Everybody knows there are plenty of smart people in the Silicon Valley tech industry, but it seems the cream of the crop turned out for ChefConf, the annual confab put on by infrastructure automation vendor Chef Software.
The reason: Chef is at the center of the massive firestorm known as DevOps. And while DevOps conferences seem to be popping up like dandelions, most of them struggle with the “what is DevOps” and “how to get started with DevOps” questions.
Not so with ChefConf. This is where to find the cognoscenti who have been practicing DevOps for years. And at the center of this phenomenon is one vendor: Chef.
“DevOps is a combination of workflow, tools, and culture for delivering software at velocity,” explains Barry Crist, CEO of Chef. Chef helped kick off the DevOps movement by turning IT infrastructure into code.
Chef helps even the largest enterprises automate how they build, deploy, and manage infrastructure, both on-premise and in the cloud. The end result? IT infrastructure that is as versionable, testable, and repeatable as application code.
The power of DevOps is unquestionable. According to Crist, some of Chef’s clients have seen an 8,000-times reduction in the time it takes them between committing (finalizing) code and deploying the resulting software. “You should no longer accept slow, even in traditional IT,” Christ insists.
Chef’s big announcement at ChefConf was Chef Delivery, a software development and deployment workflow tool. Chef Delivery supports the ability to visualize the flow of changes to software, handle dependencies across multiple projects and services, and automatically test individual pieces of code as well as how they all work together.
In fact, Chef Delivery turns the entire software pipeline into code, and empowers teams to handle governance and security seamlessly as part of their automated software delivery lifecycle.
Highlights of the Chef Ecosystem
In keeping with the DevOps “automate all the things” motto, several vendors joined the party by exhibiting at the conference, partnering with Chef and extending its capabilities in various ways. Here are some of the highlights.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/04/03/chefconf-party-at-devops-ground-zero/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, CA Technologies is an Intellyx customer and CliQr is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Chef Software covered the cost of Jason Bloomberg’s travel to ChefConf, a standard industry practice. Image credit: Jason Bloomberg.
