Microsoft’s Jeremy Winter at ChefConf: Stagnation is more dangerous than change

Do Change was the theme of ChefConf 2018, and Jeremy Winter, Partner Director – Azure Management and Security, personifies change throughout his career. During his 21 year career at Microsoft, Jeremy started as a developer, moved to running operations for Hotmail, and now runs program management for Azure Management and Security.

With the rapid pace of innovation, the only constant we can be confident about is change itself. Jeremy started his talk with a personal story of his early days at Microsoft wherein his first manager handed him a dot matrix printout that stated “stagnation is more dangerous than change”.

Chef and Azure

Azure and Chef have a long standing partnership and together what we aim to deliver is the ability for customers to use the tools they love (such as Chef) natively within Azure. The demo presented during Jeremy’s keynote showed off an amazing new integration of Habitat with the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and how InSpec, which is now natively available though the Azure Cloud Shell, can be invoked directly from the Azure Portal. You can watch a recording of his presentation below.

The demo

Steven Murawski, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft and an active member of the Chef Community, together with Nell Shamrell Harrington, Principal software development engineer at Chef, role played two developers working  together to collaborate using Visual Studio Code live share. There is a Habitat plugin for both Visual Studio Code (VSC) and Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS), which allows developers to use Habitat from within VSTS and VSC. Subsequently, the app they built was deployed into a Docker container within Azure Container Registry, and from there into the AKS.

The second part of the demo highlights InSpec’s integration into the Azure Portal. This makes it very simple for folks to run InSpec scans from within Azure Cloud Shell.

Using the Habitat integration with AKS and Azure Cloud Shell allows you to migrate apps into Azure using the Azure Kubernetes Service. Using InSpec, you can run compliance scans against virtual machines as well as containers and the entire Azure subscription.

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Vikram Ghosh

VP of Business Development focussed on Cloud Partners and ISVs