Progress Chef Automate is changing…a little bit. Organizations and DevOps engineers worldwide have adopted Chef Automate as an observability and reporting platform for the Progress Chef suite of infrastructure configuration management and compliance tools.
Chef Automate provides two types of licenses: trial and commercial. A trial license is for users or organizations interested in exploring the product before buying. A commercial license is for customers who have purchased and are entitled to use it according to the license terms.
Trial users can explore and evaluate the product faster with in-product engagement capabilities. They will not solely depend on the Chef Sales team for product demonstration and evaluation. Commercial users will have self-help tutorials and resources for every crucial step of their product operation. They will be able to provide direct feedback on the product and have an improved product usage experience.
In the new version of Chef Automate, capabilities and features will be restricted according to the tenure and purpose of the existing license. This will help us better serve both community and commercial users.
What has changed?
Once a license expires, a user cannot use Chef Automate features and capabilities. All trial licenses will cease to operate once the expiry date has elapsed. Users with commercial licenses can continue to use the product for a grace period of 60 days, after which all operations on the product will be restricted. All impacted users will have to make a request for a new license upon the expiry of their existing license.
Why are we changing?
We want to verify that the product's functionality is in line with the existing end-user license agreement (EULA) and terms of use. At the same time, we want to clearly demarcate the specifics of the commercial offering. This should encourage users to make the right decision about the type of license they should procure. Our focus has always been on meeting the needs of the community and customers. And with this change, we will reinstate it.
Impact of change
Upon the license expiring, all product features, including UI workflows, data ingestion pipelines, report generation and data exporting in standalone or highly available mode will be impacted. Users need to complete UI workflows and run automated scripts to fetch data via CLI or API.
The impact on different types of license holders will be:
- Trial license - On expiry of the license, product features will not be available for meaningful use.
- Commercial license - On expiry of the license, a pre-specified grace period will be provided to the customer to update the license. After the grace period, product features will not be available for meaningful use.
What do I need to do?
If you are using the latest version of Chef Automate, you do not need to take any action today. We recommend that customers stay with the latest releases of Chef Automate to receive the benefits of new functionality, bug fixes, vulnerability remediations and support under their license agreement with Progress. When the new Chef Automate version is available, we recommend upgrading.
If your trial license has expired, you should contact your sales partner or account manager to determine the next step. If your commercial license has expired but is still within the grace period, you should contact your respective account manager to obtain a new license.
Mitigation
We recommend understanding the license’s limitations, including usage tenure. Our suggestion is to plan the product’s usage based on the license’s purpose. Additionally, you should be mindful of the tenure for which it is available.
If it impacts you, we suggest contacting your account managers or sales consultants to determine the next steps and update to a license that meets your needs.
Please contact ankur.mundhra@progress.com or kallol.roy@progress.com or your customer success team if you have any questions regarding your Chef Automate deployments.