Posted On: May 7, 2019
AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate now supports Chef Automate 2, which is an upgrade that makes it much easier to explore the state of your infrastructure and has an even greater emphasis on compliance features than its predecessor. Chef Automate has been re-architectured using a Go-based microservice architecture and includes an enhanced web UI providing a streaming event feed, trend graphs and a rich query language.
Using Chef Automate 2, AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate empowers you to uphold configuration compliance of any resource in your infrastructure. It comes with 149 prepared compliance profiles including Center for Information Security (CIS) profiles for 45 AWS resources. It also introduces a compliance profile for Secure Technical Implementation Guidelines (STIG), which is a security technical implementation guide developed by the Defense Information Systems Agency.
You are not limited to verify configuration compliance of AWS resources only. Through API integration with Chef InSpec, you can use AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate to test and manage resource compliance in heterogeneous environments. From the unified Chef Automate dashboard, you can analyze infrastructure and compliance automation data spanning on-premise, AWS and other cloud environments.
In regard to configuration options, Chef Automate 2 brings preservation during backup and restore of any customization you perform of your Chef Automate settings, e.g. LDAP and SAML configuration. You can configure a data retention period which enables automatic removal of nodes that are not checking in anymore. An action that used to be manual.
As of today, all newly created OpsWorks servers will automatically get AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate with Chef Automate 2. Existing customers already up and running with AWS OpsWorks for Chef Automate will within the next months be offered a migration path. From the OpsWorks console, it will be possible through a button-click to upgrade any existing Chef Automate server to Automate 2.
Should you be new to OpsWorks for Chef Automate and curious to experience it, it is easy to get started. By following this Getting Started walk-through, you can within 15 minutes be up and running with your first compliance profile and your first compliance check.