As we move into September, I am reflecting back on the summer, which was a special and memorable time as it was the first summer post-COVID shutdowns (for the most part). It seemed as though everyone took a little extra time off work this summer to reconnect with family, travel, and enjoy life. Along with this, the pace of work slowed to a crawl over the last couple of months. Did you feel that as well?
Personally, I am very happy September has arrived. For me, September means new beginnings, renewed energy, sparked motivation, and increased productivity. This year, I’m really looking forward to kicking off this growth season by virtually attending Chef Conf 2022 on September 12th and 13th. I’m excited to connect with the DevOps community and participate in talks focused on some of the most impactful and timely topics of today, namely, Policy as Code and DevSecOps, Multi-Cloud Security, and Observability. Chef has always been known for strong community and driving DevOps innovation and this year’s lineup of talks will not disappoint! Here are my top 3 areas of focus for this year’s conference and why.
- Shifting security left with Policy as Code
With security breaches at an all-time high, new ways to automate security compliance and remediation is imperative for every organization. Whether workloads are on premise or in the Public Cloud, the burden of security posture management is heavy and complex given the tradeoffs of security policy compliance against business agility and innovation.
In order to address both security risks and compliance requirements in a way that does not slow down innovation, building security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) and DevOps toolchains is a win-win. With policy as code, security policies are written, stored, and executed in a programming language, allowing easy integration with developers or DevOps tools, shifting security left to reduce or eliminate run time vulnerabilities and compliance issues. Policy as code has many benefits for organizations that adopt it. These are centered around better collaboration, catching issues sooner, versioning, and customization. We have seen only a handful of clients adopting Policy as Code at this time, however, given the natural extension of the SDLC and DevOps tools to support this as a best practice, PaC is poised to be the next hottest best practice for 2023.
2. Chef Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM)
CSPM is end-to-end security compliance, governance, and visibility for multi-cloud environments. Shifting security left via Policy as Code is only part of a fulsome security posture solution for organizations and end-to-end management of security posture also needs to be considered. I’m specifically interested to hear how Chef CSPM provides policy visibility and consistent enforcement of said policies, continuous vulnerability scanning, and accelerated auditing compliance. These capabilities are critical to securing infrastructure in the Public Cloud and having all these capabilities in one tool, one pane of glass, is a strong value add for my clients.
3. Observability for Config Management & Compliance
One of my favourite topics these days is Observability. I come from a technical support background, as well as QA and Sys Admin, and this is a topic near and dear to my heart as I know how critical it is to have proper visibility into your running applications and infrastructure. In today’s complex runtime environments and microservices-based architecture, it’s a different world that requires a new way of monitoring, logging, and alerting. At this year’s Chef Conf, I am interested to learn more about Observability for Config Management & Compliance specifically, to hear about how to manage data from heterogeneous environments and sense making to have a holistic view into your system. Equipping your customer-facing teams with proper tooling and visibility brings value to the business by increasing customer satisfaction, whether that’s due to decreased downtime, lower production deployment downtime, or increase time to resolve production issues.
To bring it all together, Chef goes the extra mile to ensure customer success by fostering a strong community through learn.chef.io where there are multiple learning tracks to upskill everyone on your teams. In addition, Chef Professional Services and their strong partner network is always available to provide services with respect to product introduction and integration to reduce time to value and deliver ROI on your DevOps investment. Indellient has been a proud Chef partner since 2017, earning the coveted distinction of Partner of the Year in 2020.
I hope to see you at Chef Conf 2022!
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