This coming April will mark one year since the introduction of the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack. As part of this release, we announced that all of our products are now open source under the Apache 2 license and that Chef’s tested, enterprise-ready software distributions (binaries) are subject commercial license terms going forward.
Today anyone can build, modify, or distribute any of our software without restriction, provided our trademark policy is followed. In turn, new distributions of software produced by Chef require an enterprise license for commercial use. More details on the changes to our licensing model can be found in these Frequently Asked Questions.
What’s happening this April?
After April 30th, 2020, Chef will be ending support for Chef Infra Client 14.x, Chef InSpec 3.x, ChefDK 3.x, and Chef Workstation 0.3, and will no longer provide bugfix or security updates to these versions. This is particularly significant, as these are the final supported free distributions of each tool.
As of May 1st, 2020, the only supported, warrantied, and tested distributions of Chef’s software will require a license for commercial use.
In addition to ensuring that our distributions receive security updates and performance tuning, Chef remains dedicated to continuously improving our software so we continue to provide the best automation solutions available. Here are just a few highlights from the past year:
- Chef Automate now includes improved IAM capabilities, and new integrations with tools like ServiceNow.
- Chef Workstation has seen a ton of updates to Cookstyle, which can help ensure your Chef Infra Cookbooks are up to date with our latest best practices, as well as notarization for MacOS Catalina, to ensure a smooth install experience.
- Chef Infra has seen various OS-compatibility improvements to speed up execution, and facilitate broader laptop & endpoint management. New features like notify groups to let you make your automation more powerful by having better control of event-driven configuration changes.
- Chef InSpec has expanded its cloud & container support, received certification for multiple CIS Benchmarks (including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud!), and the newly-released waivers beta allows easy management of security exceptions.
- Chef Habitat saw the release of version 1.5, which in addition to performance enhancements and Learn Chef Rally updates, included the ability to stream application data into Chef Automate, and deploy Chef Habitat Builder on-premises.
What do I do next?
As a first step, head over to the Why Chef Enterprise page to see an overview of the benefits of a paid license.
Make sure you familiarize yourself with our licensing FAQ. It covers our subscription change in greater detail, and aims to answer any questions you might have.
If you’re not currently a Chef customer, and want to learn more about the process of upgrading to a licensed version, Let us know!
To see what’s new in the Chef Community, be sure to join us in Chef Community Slack to talk about everything from automation to OSS and beyond!
