Chef

About Chef

Chef Software, now part of Progress, operates as a significant player in the IT automation and DevOps sector, providing tools to manage complex infrastructure as code. The company was founded in 2008 as Opscode by Adam Jacob, Jesse Robbins, Barry Steinglass, and Nathen Haneysmith. Adam Jacob created the initial tool for his consulting business, which aimed to build end-to-end server deployment solutions. Recognizing its potential after his experience at Amazon, Jesse Robbins partnered with Jacob and the other co-founders to establish the company. A pivotal moment in its history was the acquisition by Progress in October 2020 for $220 million, a strategic move to integrate Chef's automation capabilities into Progress's portfolio of application development and digital experience technologies. Prior to the acquisition, Chef had raised over $100 million in funding from investors including DFJ Growth, Battery Ventures, and Hewlett Packard Ventures.

The firm's business model centers on selling commercial subscriptions for its enterprise-grade products, which are built upon an open-source foundation. This model provides paying customers with hardened, enterprise-ready software distributions, dedicated support, and additional features, while the underlying source code is developed openly under the Apache 2.0 license. Chef serves large-scale enterprises, including many Fortune 500 companies, in sectors where strict, auditable compliance and control over vast server fleets are critical. Revenue is generated primarily on a per-node, per-year subscription basis.

The product suite is designed to automate the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and applications. **Progress Chef Automate** serves as the central enterprise platform, offering a unified dashboard for visibility, workflow management, and analytics across all environments. It integrates the portfolio's core components, allowing teams to collaborate on building, deploying, and managing infrastructure and applications. **Chef Infra** is the foundational configuration management tool that allows users to define infrastructure as code using "recipes" and "cookbooks." It ensures that servers and systems are configured consistently and correctly, whether on-premises or in multi-cloud environments. **Chef InSpec** is an open-source framework for compliance and security automation. It compares the actual state of a system against security and policy rules defined in code, generating reports to detect and highlight violations without automatically remediating them, thus putting control in the hands of the operators. These tools collectively enable organizations to increase deployment speed, enhance service resiliency, and improve risk management.