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How Chef.io Tripled Release Cadence for On-Prem and Air-Gapped Customers
“Replicated gave us an easy path to get out to customers and give them this new capability.”
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Overview
Chef.io, a Progress Software business, builds DevSecOps tools that help enterprises manage infrastructure, apply patches, and maintain compliance across a wide range of environments. Many of Chef’s customers operate in regulated or security-sensitive industries and deploy software on-prem or in fully air-gapped environments.
With Chef 360, a new container-native flagship product, Chef began a major platform transition. For long-time customers accustomed to VM-based deployments, introducing Kubernetes carried real adoption risk.
Replicated provided the delivery foundation that allowed Chef to modernize Chef 360 while continuing to support on-prem and air-gapped customers, making it easier for enterprises to adopt a container-native platform without taking on additional operational complexity.
Challenge
Chef’s customers span highly regulated industries, including financial services, government, and defense, where software is often deployed on-prem or in fully air-gapped environments.
“The bulk of our customers are what we would consider on-prem,” said Loomis. “They might deploy in a data center, in their cloud, or often we have regulated customers and defense customers that are in an air gap scenario.”
With Chef 360, Chef introduced a container-native platform to a customer base that had long deployed Chef on virtual machines.
“Our customers’ understanding of our platform was really: you’re on VMs, we deploy you the same way we’ve always deployed you,” Loomis said. “Here we are with a brand new flagship product that was all containers, all Helm charts - very complicated technology.”
Chef had already experienced how difficult it was to build and maintain its own delivery and support tooling, and the team knew that repeating that approach for a Kubernetes-based platform would slow adoption and pull engineering focus away from product development.
Chef needed a way to introduce Chef 360 without forcing customers to become Kubernetes experts, and without reliving the cost and complexity of managing a bespoke distribution system in-house.
Solution
To avoid repeating the cost and complexity of building delivery infrastructure in-house, Chef partnered with Replicated to simplify how Chef 360 is packaged, delivered, and supported in customer-controlled environments.
“We found that from an ease-of-adoption perspective, Replicated gave us an easy path to get out to customers and give them this new capability,” Loomis said.
Replicated gave Chef a standardized delivery foundation for onboarding, upgrades, licensing, and support across on-prem and air-gapped environments. Rather than rebuilding surrounding delivery infrastructure, Replicated handled core concerns such as authentication, licensing, downloads, and generating air-gapped bundles, allowing Chef’s engineers to stay focused on building Chef 360 itself.
Through a self-service portal, customers can deploy Chef 360, monitor deployment health, and upgrade on their own timeline, while Replicated manages the underlying complexity of packaging and distribution.
The portal became a key differentiator in helping customers adopt and manage Chef 360.
“Our customers could go in, see what was happening, click upgrade, watch the progress bar go by - and they were updated,” Loomis said. “That fit and finish helped make our solution look better and made it very easy for customers to jump in.”
Beyond the platform itself, Replicated worked closely with Chef engineers during both the initial rollout and ongoing customer operations.
“The responsiveness of the team stood out immediately. They worked directly with our engineers and helped support our customers through deployment and troubleshooting.”
Results
With Replicated in place, Chef accelerated adoption of Chef 360 while reducing the operational and support burden associated with delivering a container-native platform to on-prem and air-gapped customers.
As a result, Chef achieved:
- Minutes, not days, to onboard new customers and trials. “It is minutes for us to onboard a new customer,” Loomis said. “Minutes, not days.”
- Significant engineering time saved by avoiding bespoke delivery infrastructure. “This saves us probably 10 engineers worth of time for launching a product,” Loomis said.
- Faster customer support and time-to-resolution through support bundles. “In the past, our support group would spend days going back and forth,” Loomis said. “With the customer support bundles, that is minutes.”
- Dramatically faster unblocking of customer deployments. “We have customers that were unstuck within 15 minutes of engaging Replicated,” Loomis said. “They’d been stuck for a week going back and forth with our teams.”
Taken together, Replicated helped Chef modernize its product delivery without leaving its most valuable on-prem and regulated customers behind, balancing speed, simplicity, and scale as Chef 360 evolved.
Chef can now onboard customers in minutes, down from days.
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Chef can now unblock customer deployments in 15 minutes, down from 1 week.
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