[Excerpt from Jason English in SiliconANGLE May 24, 2019]
Modernize or die. Lift-and-shift. Rip-and-replace.
While enterprises are confronted by these kinds of binary imperatives at many events, it makes sense that the ChefConf 2019 conference this week in Seattle would cater to technologists seeking a third way, since conference sponsor Chef Inc. is a systems configuration management firm.
To the theme, “Automating the Coded Enterprise” and accompanied by a full-time thumping DJ, Chef Chief Executive Barry Crist greeted a campily described audience of “digital ass kickers” and then offered some measured reality.
“This stuff is really hard — collectively, the industry is only 10% of the way along with this,” Crist said of the poor level of end-to-end code automation present in all but the highest-performing enterprises.
Large enterprises are hobbled by high compliance requirements, proprietary, siloed systems and ongoing operational needs. Nobody presenting here expects information technology teams to magically shift to faster, DevOps-style release cycles and “cloud native”-style architectures without paying down technical debt in manual test, deploy and repair cycles.
What an event like this can accomplish…
Logging images from strong #AEM demos Day 1 #ChefConf2019 Automating the intractable, abstracting the practical #cicd @Intellyx @chef #thenorthremembers pic.twitter.com/d8Aid6MnWf
— Jason English (@bluefug) May 22, 2019
