An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Chef could have rested on its bona fides of once whipping up the critical Infrastructure-as-Code aspect of DevOps, and democratizing the developer-centric capability to code and leverage Chef recipes to automate the creation of software environments.
But the company that grew to represent automation of everything-as-code hasn’t shied away from disrupting itself, announcing in April 2019 that the Chef product suite went 100% Apache 2.0 license open source, including formerly commercial elements of its Enterprise Automation Stack for complex deployment management. It’s all out there on Github.
No two DevOps shops are standardized alike. Enterprise software delivery teams are now faced with a selection overload of so many other developer open source tools, SaaS and cloud solution offerings and existing COTS software in their own pipelines.
Therefore, while building out a complete Chef Habitat environment delivery feature, integrations allow freedom of choice for pulling in any underlying combination of repos (Github, Travis, etc.), Build/CI/CD tools (Jenkins, Ansible, etc.), cloud provisioning, container deployment and orchestration frameworks, test automation tools, yada yada.
Given the incredibly dynamic nature of DevOps practices, and the desire for developers to contribute to the open source movement while developing their own business apps, the open moves promote goodwill and capture the way enterprises are starting to move away from purchasing and licensing software on a TCO (total cost of ownership) basis. Of course, customers will still pay for enterprise-class support, services and validated commercial-grade releases.
Such a transition will not be as simple as boiling water for Chef, but so far it looks like they have received positive engagement from partners, users and development contributors in the global software development community.
Copyright ©2019 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives, and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, Chef is a former Intellyx customer. None of the other organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. To be considered for a Brain Candy article, email us at pr@intellyx.com.
