As National Cyber Security Awareness Month comes to a close, it’s a great opportunity for all of us to make security and compliance part of our daily routine. I know, I know…no one thinks about “compliance” and gets excited. However, taking advantage of tools like InSpec can help us conquer everyday compliance with ease.

Last week Chef announced Chef Automate 1.7, a notable release that integrates remote compliance scanning capabilities into Chef Automate. Now, organizations can add nodes and execute ad hoc remote compliance scans from Chef Automate without the need for an agent to be deployed on the node.

It takes a community of passionate and involved partners to fuel the love of Chef, DevOps, and automation. Our partnerships with Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services have made for an exciting experience using Chef Automate. You can learn more about our partner integrations on the Chef web pages for Azure and AWS.

Automation is a big component in providing IT as a service. Trace3, a Chef partner since 2013, empowers organizations to keep pace with the rapidly changing IT landscape by leveraging innovative technologies, like Chef, allowing companies to leverage Continuous Automation and ensure a competitive edge in today’s marketplace. DevOps is not necessarily a “natural” process.

Editor Note: “Habitatize Yourself” a Ruby Web Application is a YouTube series hosted by Franklin Webber. This series takes you from idea to Habitat-packaged Ruby application in a lunch break. Watch, learn and code along with him and see how Habitat makes building, deploying, and managing modern applications delightful.

Last week we held our fourth annual Chef Community Summit in London on Tuesday and Wednesday. As our primary annual event in the EMEA region, folks from the UK, Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, and Austria, in addition to the US and Japan attend the London Summit.

We’re excited to talk about a new preview feature in Habitat that we feel will unlock some more interesting use cases that community members have been wanting for a while. In this post, we’ll talk about composite packages and how they might help you. What is a Composite Package?

Besides helping ensure compliance with regulatory standards, InSpec is a great solution for detecting compliance with your organization’s own rules and expectations. Our friends at Jack Henry & Associates Inc. recently detected and corrected an issue in their environment thanks to the power of InSpec and Chef Automate.

Overview Now is a great time to start thinking about deploying a new Chef Server.