Infrastructure Management
Automate, Scale and Integrate DevSecOps Into Infrastructure Management
Apply configurations consistently across environments and manage your infrastructure with ease using the Chef Automation Platform.
Using Chef, You Can:
Change Safely
Automate systems' adherence to declared desired state and minimize security delays and fire drills.
Scale Easily
The largest companies in the world, like Meta, GM and SAP count on Chef to automate infrastructure management at a massive scale.
Run Anywhere
Infrastructure automation solutions for multi-OS, multi-cloud, on-premises, agentless, hybrid and complex legacy architectures.
Leverage Insights
Real-time data that is easy to filter and provides reachable and actionable data for every node under management.
Unlock Infrastructure Efficiency:
Essential Features
of the Chef Platform
- Available Languages
Automation is only as complex as the problems it needs to solve; use a human readable language and a Ruby model when faced with complex scenarios
- Access Control
Customize and provide resource-specific authorizations to users and teams. Notifications can be displayed on a per-node or per-failure basis.
- Testing Environment
The Chef platform includes Workstation – a development toolkit designed to streamline creation, testing and deploying configurations and policies efficiently.
- AIOps Data Mapping
With a multitude of supporting integrations to leverage, data can be sent to intelligence and monitoring systems via a feature called ‘Data Path’ (including an advanced 2-way integration with ServiceNow CMDB and webhook notifications)
- Unlock Infrastructure Efficiency
Integrate with various software across the DevOps ecosystem, including source code and artefact repositories, CI/CD pipelines, provisioning software and secrets management tools.
Consistent Configuration
Eliminate configuration drift and continuously enforce desired state.
System Hardening
Reduce risks by ensuring OSs, firmware, and system libraries are kept up to date.
Hybrid Cloud Control
Effectively work with different clouds minimizing complexity through multi-cloud support.
Automated Remediation
Event-driven automation that can immediately correct configuration drift.
High Security, Low Trust Environments
Control access and accelerate delivery in highly regulated environments.
Continuous Delivery Pipeline Automation
Enable developer services and drive pull-based CI/CD system workflows.
Principle of Infrastructure Automation with Chef
Bridge the gap between configuration and compliance with an as-code approach while having complete visibility over your IT fleet.
Infrastructure as Code
Use Infrastructure as Code to automate infrastructure management across platforms like Windows, Linus, MacOS & more.
Single Pane of Glass
Maintain consistency across clouds with a GUI-based control plane that works in real-time and on-demand.
Configuration meets Compliance
Use a single agent for configuration and compliance.
People Proven Progress
Discover how the Chef platform helps drive success for teams and organizations.
Continuous Compliance and Streamlined Auditing
Use the Chef platform not just for configuration management but for security and compliance checks too.
Policy as Code
Convert policy documents into Chef policies easily with code and automate both misconfiguration detection and remediation.
Job Orchestration at Scale
Automate complex, condition based actions like patching, update rollouts or maintenance across large fleets of servers.
Chef Support at Your Fingertips
Chef Infrastructure Management combines the power of open source community based software development and enterprise class support.
Chef Enterprise
Distributions
Dedicated services that include trusted, hardened, production-ready software distributions, support, expert help, training, reporting and much more.
Learn MoreChef
Community
Chef Supermarket is the site for thousands of configuration templates (Cookbooks), for Chef Infra, that are built and maintained by the Chef Community.
Learn MoreChef
Automation
Enterprise dashboard and analytics tool enabling cross-team collaboration with actionable insights for configuration and compliance and an auditable history of changes to environments.
Learn More
Customer Stories
Manage a 15K Node Cluster
Using Chef allowed Phil Dibowitz and his team at Meta to build a flexible system that allowed a small team to manage an incredibly large number of systems with a variety of unique configurations.
read the storyRecommended Content
Frequently Asked Questions
What is infrastructure automation?
IT automation, or infrastructure automation, replaces manual, often error-prone IT tasks and processes with operations performed automatically. Automation is often used for processes that occur often, such as configuring end-user devices and servers or addressing common errors.
Why is the importance of infrastructure automation?
Infrastructure automation is vital for efficient, cost-effective IT operations. It is so crucial that Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of enterprises will be using structured automation for its efficiency and flexibility.
Here are some Infrastructure Automation Benefits:
IT and DevOps pros are flocking to automation to ease infrastructure deployment. Application and end-user device deployment are two hot areas. Here are four more benefits:
- Efficiency: Using automation instead of doing a task manually improves efficiency.
- Reducing errors: By automating processes that are proven to work, errors are reduced or even eliminated.
- Security: Misconfigurations are one of the biggest security threats. Automation performs these configurations in a way that is proven to work.
- Compliance: Compliance processes help keep the IT environment secure and data safe from hackers or data leakage. Once these processes have been perfected, they can be performed flawlessly through automation.
How does infrastructure automation work?
In general, the process is first performed, and then perfected as a manual operation, then turned into a workflow or automated process.
IT automation can be used for very simple processes, but steps can also be daisy-chained to perform complex tasks. A higher level of IT automation is where processes such as IT deployments are invoked and performed autonomously based on certain triggers or end-user behaviors.
Today, infrastructure automation is commonly based on code that executes processes determined by an IT expert, what those actions are and exactly how they are to be taken.
Complex automation processes can be created by bringing together multiple scripts or pieces of code.
What IT infrastructure processes can be automated?
Most manual IT functions can be replaced by an automated process. Here are three common cases:
Configuration: Gartner and Forrester have long argued that 80% of SaaS breaches stem from misconfiguration, inappropriate user behavior or mistakenly elevated user permissions. When enterprises correctly define, apply and maintain configurations, many of these problems disappear.
Finding and solving problems: Automation can be combined with monitoring to discover issues, perform root cause analysis and then trigger an automated fix.
An IT automation tool could monitor the configuration of software, systems and other infrastructure components, discover unexpected or unauthorized changes and automatically take corrective actions. This could include restoring correct configuration settings or shifting workloads from a down server to an available one.
Application delivery: DevOps teams use automation to speed up application development, testing and delivery. In this case, DevOps often uses code as the functional basis of automation.
What are some examples of infrastructure automation products?
There are several products and vendors in the IT infrastructure automation space:
- Ansible: Open-source tool for deployment, configuration and orchestration.
- Chef: IT automation that uses an ‘as code’ approach to policy configuration and infrastructure.Works with various automation partners, including Ansible, Jenkins and Docker.
- Docker: Automation aimed at containerization.
- Jenkins: Aimed at application delivery and orchestration.
- Puppet: Uses ‘as code’ approach to automating DevOps changes and configuration.
- Terraform: Provides code automation.
The IT Infrastructure Management Solutions of Progress Chef
Chef Infrastructure Management solutions easily and quickly apply configurations.
Chef helps DevOps teams adopt modern best practices, including:
- Test Driven Development: Configuration change testing runs parallel to application change testing.
- AI Ops Support: IT operations scale with data consolidations and third-party integrations.
- Self-Service: Agile delivery teams can deploy and provision infrastructure on demand.
Benefits of Chef Infrastructure Management
Change Apps Safely: Chef automates systems’ adherence to the declared desired state, reduces security delays and avoids fire drills.
Run Everywhere: Chef infrastructure automation solutions support on-premises, hybrid, multi-OS, multi-cloud and complex legacy environments.The software automates Windows, Mac, Linux and more.
Scale Easily: Major companies, including GM, Meta/Facebook, SAP and Bank Hapoalim, rely on Chef to automate massively.
Get Actionable Insights: IT easily filters real-time data that is reachable and actionable for every node under management.
Chef Infrastructure Management supports infrastructure as code (IAC), automating the managing and testing of configurations and system state.The policy-based approach implements test-driven development and idempotency principles.
Learn about our leading infrastructure management automation solutions by visiting the Chef Infrastructure Management page.