Chef adds high availability flavour for Automate customers

Chef adds high availability flavour for Automate customers

Automation software company Chef has introduced users of continuous automation platform Chef Automate to a new offering looking to availability, performance, and disaster recovery. 

According to a blog post by Customer Engineering lead Irving Popovetsky, Chef Automate Cluster is meant for customers “running more than 10,000 nodes and/or those with demanding SLAs”. To reduce downtime for those, the new product follows a start to finish approach which includes providing an expert to install and configure a Chef Automate Cluster in the customer’s preferred cloud or private data center. 

Setups for companies purchasing the plan for several installations will also receive an implementation of a disaster recovery configuration that fits their requirements.

Since security is on the mind of all serious businesses, all systems will be set up in a way that ensures that “all API and data services are restricted to mutual-TLS authentication and transport encryption”. This means that all data transported from client to server and back as well as those making their way through the cluster are protected out of the box. Customers looking for a comparable level of security for their resting data can request integration of full-disk encryption solutions, which will then be taken care of during installation as well.

Once that is done, the cluster will be validated through load and failover testing. Chef Professional Services will also check if backup and monitoring work as intended and train operators so that they can make best use of the platform. If they need help later on, the plan includes a monthly Operations Review meeting (which seems to boil down to regular calls), and a yearly visit to look into the cluster and see if there’s anything to improve.

Apart from that, systems documentation for each install is available to Chef’s support team, so that they have all necessary information available, should something go wrong. 

More information is available on request only for now. 

There’s at least one customer that likely won’t be able to enjoy the new product. Over the last week, Chef has made the headlines over a contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. This led to some harsh criticism so that the company now announced to not renew the engagement.