Progress today announced updates to the portfolio of DevOps offerings it gained with the acquisition of Chef earlier this month.
A Chef Infrastructure Management offering now combines Chef Infra and Chef Automate into a single offering, while Chef App Delivery combines Chef Habitat, Chef Infra and Chef Automate into a single offering that creates an artifact that can run anywhere.
Sundar Subramanian, senior vice president and general manager for core products at Progress, said the goal is to organize the Chef portfolio around a set of distinct offerings for automating the management of infrastructure and continuous delivery (CD). Instead of simply offering a set of tools for power uses, Subramanian said Progress is moving toward creating a set of platforms.
At the same time, Progress announced a dedicated content delivery service that provides access to a library of curated Chef Premium Content for compliance scanning and remediation that complies with the best practices defined by the Center for Internet Security (CIS).
Finally, Chef has added a Learn Chef Skills Validation Program based on the online Learn Chef platform and the OpenBadges Standard, a specification designed to promote certifications that teach skills in a way that are both verifiable and portable.
CD and infrastructure management are typically handled by different members of the same DevOps team. By segmenting its offering around federated responsibilities, the Chef software portfolio will become easier for DevOps teams to consume based on specific tasks, Subramanian said.
Progress expects its offerings in the months ahead to have greater appeal among midmarket IT organizations that are accelerating multiple digital business transformation initiatives in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, he noted. The company has been focused on providing application development tools to these organizations for decades, and as their IT operations mature, many are beginning to embrace best DevOps practices as they seek to reduce the total cost of IT operations.
The challenge those organizations face today is they depend heavily on ITIL-based frameworks for managing IT. Beyond acquiring DevOps tools and platforms, most of those organizations are at the beginning a what has been shown to be a transformation to DevOps processes that requires major changes to the culture of an IT organization. The cultural transition often involves years of effort as organizations try to balance different approaches to managing IT based on ITIL and DevOps processes.
It’s too early to say what path to automation of IT those organizations will take. The Chef tools still require a level of programming expertise to employ that is often lacking among traditional IT operations staff. Not to mention the fact that Progress is not the only DevOps platform provider looking to expand its reach into the midmarket.
Regardless of the path chosen, the number of organizations that embrace DevOps principles is about to expand significantly.
