Chef Simplifies Tracking of Application Dependencies

Software-Defined Networking and the Enterprise

One of the major challenges that IT organizations routinely face is figuring out which applications and services are dependent upon one another at any given time. Not having clear visibility into those dependencies affects everything from the way applications are tested to the way regulatory compliance gets enforced.

To make it simpler for IT organizations to keep track of those dependencies, Chef this week added a Dependency Management module to its Chef Delivery suite of tools for managing integrated DevOps environments. Chef this week also enhanced its Chef Compliance module in a way that makes it simpler to implement policies based on the benchmarks created by the Center for Internet Security (CIS) as well as import policies from Microsoft Security Compliance Manager.

Ken Cheney, vice president of business development for Chef, notes that most IT environments these days consist of a morass of services pipelines that are constantly being updated. Keeping track of all the dependencies associated with any one of those pipelines is a major headache. By making use of Chef to track those dependencies as well as manage the overall DevOps environment, Cheney says, it becomes much easier to manage a modern IT environment consisting of multiple IT services.

Of course, DevOps has as much to do with IT culture as it does the tools used to manage the IT environment. In some cases, many IT organizations are making a choice to embrace DevOps as a new way to manage IT. But just as often, IT organizations are taking a more evolutionary approach that starts with changing the tools in the expectation that their processes will evolve.

In either case, it’s clear that some form of new IT is evolving from a new set of functions that many IT organizations are just now starting to put in place.