The first session I attended at ChefConf 2022 was the roadmap session with Prashanth Nanjundappa, VP of Product Management Progress Chef.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

View fullsize

Prashanth was joined by his colleagues to review the progress they have made over the last year and their plans for the year ahead.

Presenting alongside Prashanth was:-

Stephen Blankenship - Principal Product Manager - Infra, Desktop and Application Delivery

Sharan Rayakar - Principal Product Manager - Compliance and Security

Nischal Reddy - Principal Product Manager - Platform and Cloud

Looking Back

Over the last year, it was discussed how there had been a focus on making the products easier to use as well as ensuring they deliver quicker time to value.

To this end the following features have been worked upon or improved over the last year.

1. Flexible deployment models

   1. On-Premises

   2. Chef SaaS

   3. Marketplace Deployments (Azure and AWS)

   4. High-Availability Deployment Models

2. Automation of Infra Views

   1. Allowing users to undertake increased management tasks from the UI rather than just the command interface. This makes the product easier to use and to pick up for inexperienced users whilst advanced users can continue to use the command interface.

3. Data Feed

   1. Send Chef Client Run and Compliance Scan data to 3rd party tools like IT Asset Management and Config management solutions.

      1. Webhook Integrations

         1. ServiceNow

         2. Splunk

         3. ELK

         4. Custom

      2. Storage Integrations

         1. Amazon S3

         2. minio

4. IoT and Edge Management

   1. Using Chef Habitat to manage all applications and dependencies across and IoT estate.

      1. This has been proven to save management time and increase efficiencies.

5. Chef Cloud Security - Chef CSPM

   1. Chef Cloud Security allows users to assess their cloud infrastructures in AWS, Azure and GCP against up-to-date best practise and compliance guidelines.

   2. Container orchestration platforms such as Docker and Kubernetes are also supported.

6. New Audit and Remediation Content for Chef Compliance

   1. A large amount of new audit and remediation content has been added to Chef Compliance, allowing support for new and updated OS’s and Apps.

Looking Forward

As the session turned to look at the roadmap there was a discussion regarding how Progress had engaged with their users and the Chef community to decide upon the roadmap items. The highest voted requests were, Easy upgrades, support for scheduling push jobs, integration with IT operational support systems, support for agentless models and the ability to manage container environments.

Based upon this feedback the forward-looking roadmap is going to focus on the following three areas 1. Ease of Use and Upgrades, 2. Job Orchestration and 3. Hybrid Cloud and SaaS. It was explained how moving forward they are going to take a platform approach building a unified and extendable Enterprise Automation Platform.

Key messages from the roadmap included

• General Availability of Chef SaaS at the beginning of 2023

• Persona-related insights to be added to Compliance and Security, allowing users to identify relevant insights quickly and to remediate as required.

• Chef CPSM will have improved flows with fewer clicks allowing quicker time to value across an increasing number of cloud resources.

• The Chef Client will support rolling updates and centralised management with the ability to support two client versions simultaneously for cookbook compatibility.

• Job Orchestration Service - Will have a push-centric model with granular control allowing jobs to be run on a reoccurring basis with exception supported. It will also support jobs to be run based upon conditions.

• Workstation will have the introduction of a frequent actions UI

  • Based upon user research, it will enable new team members and non “Chef experts” to be productive in Chef faster.

Watch the session: https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Conclusion

It was interesting to hear directly from the people managing the products, learning what had been implemented over the last year and the direction of the products moving forward. I was impressed by how the product roadmap had been driven by direct feedback from the users and the community.

It was clear there is a big focus on ease of use and value to the users. I particularly like the sound of the SaaS platform for ease of adoption, the persona-based insights, and the ability to check cloud infrastructure compliance quickly and easily.

You can watch the session yourself at the link below.

https://prgress.co/3ARHT6N

Disclaimer: Tech Doodles through Tech Crossing Limited has been paid by Progress to create content covering ChefConf22. Whilst Tech Crossing Limited and the authors of this blog post have been paid to create the content, there has been no influence or editorial control by Progress.

View fullsize

Only half of the day two general session was live streamed, but above is my doodle covering what was featured. Sanjay Poonen VMware COO spoke about the engines that fuel VMware being innovation and the customer, VMware are the only company in NPS to be listed in the top 5 for customer satisfaction five years running. He also spoke about the growth of VMware and how every customer that has deployed VMware technologies has been able in turn been able to reduce costs, reduce complexity and reduce carbon. There were a number of customer references live on stage talking about how they are innovating with VMware tecnologies with a strong focus on the SDDC, VMware Cloud, PKS and NSX.

As ever the first day keynote at VMworld was packed with thought leadership, announcements and demonstrations. VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger took to the stage to discuss the super powers of technology, these were cloud, mobile, AI / ML and Edge / IOT. VMware have been slowly enhancing their long term vision of any device, any app, any cloud with intrinsic security and this years keynote further demonstrated that. 

We saw demonstrations and announcements in all areas with the release of vSphere 6.7 update 1 featuring updates for vSAN and more. We saw further demonstration of VMware's close relationship with AWS with AWS RDS (Relational Database Services) being made available on premises via vSphere in coming months. Close integration with vSphere, NSX and Kurbenetes with vSphere PKS and IoT edge infrastructures being treated as a first class citizenship bringing the IT to IoT with a demonstration of vSphere on ARM allowing for true enterprise class features such as FT, vMotion and HA being made available at the edge. 

View fullsize

VMware CTO for EMEA Joe Baguley delivered the general session at VMware Empower in Vienna, he spoke about the need for change, VMware Cloud on AWS, edge computing, NSX, everything aaS and much more.