Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2016. Read them in this 8th Annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Adam Leff, senior partner engineer, Chef
Car Racing and Software: Move Fast and Move Safe
I’m a sucker for corny comedy movies. In Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Gary Cole’s character said “If you’re not first, you’re last.” Sure, it’s a silly racing movie, but isn’t that quote just a bit true in today’s market? Who wants to be the 2nd-best or 3rd-best company in their market segment? Who wants to be using anything less than the best tool for the job?
We at Chef are seeing a remarkable trend: business is being won with software. Your company may not deliver software as your end product, but the way you get to the finish line is most certainly because of the software you use to build and manage your product pipeline. That’s why we feel 2016 will be the year of portability, compliance, and velocity.
Throughout the racing season, the car’s infrastructure is constantly changed and tuned based on past experiences. If a better component exists for the vehicle, the choice to swap is made. Vendor lock-in is a serious form of technical debt, which is why Chef provides plugins for many vendors’ infrastructure offerings, such as our plugins for vRA and vSphere. Successful companies choose the right infrastructure for their needs.
On the race track, safety is paramount. It all works If the drivers mutually understand and agree to the rules of the track: drive in the same direction, stay between the lines, don’t bump into one another. Early warnings of a potential accident are more powerful than discussing the accident after the fact.
Delivering software in a compliance-controlled environment is no different. Performing security scans after a product has launched is too late. You may learn about prior mistakes during a breach’s postmortem discussion, but again, too late. Using Chef’s Compliance and “audit mode,” you can codify your audit rules in software and perform audit scans multiple times a day and before any software is delivered. Minimize and mitigate your threats before your customers or business is even impacted, and compliance no longer becomes a road hazard.
And of course, the fastest driver wins, right? Wrong. It’s about speed and direction. Successful companies are establishing a unified pipeline for delivering changes to their products that everyone follows which enforces proper approvals, testing, and transparency. Chef Delivery is built on the years of experience of our most successful customers delivering some of the most used software in the world.
Ready to take the lead? Give Chef and our integrations a try. It’s an exciting time to be out on the road. Roll down your windows and enjoy the ride.
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About the Author
Adam Leff is a senior software engineer on Chef’s Partner Engineering team. He really enjoys writing integrations between Chef and other software and platforms, helping to fuel the love of Chef. Prior to joining Chef, Adam held engineering and management positions at WebMD. He lives in Northern VA with his family and can frequently be found at local DevOps meetups in the DC area.
