The wait is over!
We are thrilled to announce the general availability of Progress Chef Courier – a job orchestration platform for all your workflow management needs!
The Chef ecosystem caters to a gamut of automation capabilities—from infrastructure management to compliance and security to application deployment and edge management. However, the need to streamline complex workflows in the DevOps ecosystem was a consistent and key topic in our customer conversations. Practitioners either resorted to third-party tools that didn’t fit well into the Chef ecosystem or created home-grown orchestration solutions that didn’t scale well. The demand for a ‘Chef’ solution that could tie DevOps processes together to create a streamlined workflow has been consistent.
Based on this feedback, we embarked on a journey to provide job orchestration automation as a solution within the Chef umbrella. The aim was to create an enterprise-grade automation solution for job orchestration specifically designed for DevOps workflows.
We envisioned Chef Courier as a product that simplifies complex DevOps workflows and enables control over every dimension of the change rollout process. Considering this objective as our north star, we iterated over several versions. Subsequently, we released the beta version at the end of April 2024, which was met with much enthusiasm.
Considering the suggestions of our early access users, we have continuously improved the product and have now officially made Chef Courier available for everyone!
This blog will help you discover how Chef Courier can manage your workflows and unlock new possibilities for your organization.
What is Chef Courier?
Chef Courier is an enterprise job orchestration and automation platform that allows you to perform any action over your IT fleet with immense flexibility.
Watch this video to understand more:
What we mean by immense flexibility is that it gives you control over three specific dimensions—Whatever, Whenever, Wherever.
By this, we mean that you can now use Chef Courier to perform any actions (Whatever) on any target (Wherever) in your IT fleet at any time, immediate, scheduled or otherwise (Whenever).
How does this benefit you? This functionality empowers DevOps practitioners to execute ad hoc and unplanned duties without having to create bespoke solutions, especially during critical incidents. When such routine but complex tasks are automated, you will realize a significant reduction in time and effort to manage your IT fleet. Courier will provide you with more resilience and efficiency by easily integrating with pre-existing infrastructure management technologies.
Let’s look at the benefits in detail.
Benefits of Using Chef Courier
- Orchestrate Tasks for Routine Work: Chef Courier will help you automate routine tasks and enhance operational productivity. Doing this will allow you to concentrate on strategic initiatives rather than daily maintenance and troubleshooting.
- Orchestrate Tasks for Reactive Work: While orchestrating predefined work becomes easier with Chef Courier, it also makes reacting to ad-hoc work much easier. From security incident response to patching, Chef Courier makes responding to a critical incident much easier.
- Democratize DevOps: Courier jobs are defined using JSON, a widely popular format used by developers for data exchange. It also makes maintaining cookbooks, policies, and shell scripts easier. Anyone comfortable reading and writing JSON files can start working with Courier immediately.This democratizes DevOps by expanding the power of Chef beyond the niche teams and involving all stakeholders in the process.
- Get Greater Flexibility: With Chef, you get control over all dimensions when there is a change rollout. This gives you greater flexibility and granular control over your fleet by allowing you to perform any action on any node whenever you wish. Also, Courier is designed to adapt to your organization's changing needs and demands, offering more significant scale and resilience.
- Integrate with Existing Products: Chef offers various functionalities such as configuration, compliance and application deployment automation. Chef Courier brings job orchestration within the existing Chef ecosystem. We also foresee a future where Courier can integrate external products into your environment with the Chef platform.
- Employ for Varying Use Cases: Courier can be used to orchestrate not just routine workflows but also to manage various other scenarios such as incident management, node management, controlled upgrades and updates, patch management and scheduled compliance scans.
- Simplify Node Management: Chef Courier provides a unified view of all infrastructure nodes. You cannot just monitor the health and compliance status of thousands of your nodes but also update and maintain these nodes to verify that they are compliant and up to date.
- Enhanced Visibility and Control: When the synchronization and scheduling of processes are automated, monitoring and spotting risks and errors is easier. This gives IT Ops better control over what they need to work on. With better visibility, there is better collaboration between teams.
How Can I Use Chef Courier?
As you might already know, Chef has always been good at integrating well within your existing workflows. Continuing this tradition, Chef will be available through:
- A powerful CLI for customers who have a need or preference to work through a CLI
- APIs for customers who can access all actions of Courier through its APIs and integrate Courier into their pipeline and automation systems.
- An intuitive UI experience to create Courier templates and reports.
Also, the Node Management feature will allow users to categorize, organize and control nodes from a single pane of glass. Node Management is a system that will enable DevOps practitioners to have a Chef-guided system to manage all their nodes and Chef skills on their nodes. This feature allows DevSecOps engineers and admins to perform node enrollment, manage Chef skills and gain visibility/insights about the nodes
How Can You Get Started?
We work very closely with all our customers to ensure you can successfully validate the use case(s) you want to try Courier. If you wish to contact us for a trial, please fill out the form on this page. Alternatively, if you are an existing customer, you can talk to your CSM or the Account Manager.
Progress Chef Courier for All Your Job Orchestration Needs
Again, we are thrilled to announce the release of Chef Courier, which marks a significant milestone in our commitment to you, our customers. Chef Courier is designed to empower you with orchestration capabilities that will help simplify the way you work with DevOps workflows. Use Progress Chef to respond quickly to threat incidents, avoid business downtimes and always maintain the desired state of security and compliance across devices.
With rigorous testing and valuable feedback from our beta users, we are confident that Chef Courier will exceed your expectations and drive success in your endeavors. Thank you for your continued support and trust in our vision. We look forward to seeing how you leverage Chef Courier to grow your business.
Resources
Incident Response with Courier
Chef Courier for Controlled Rollouts
