ORLANDO, Florida — Chef moved its DevOps automation tools closer to Microsoft’s Azure platform, rolling out new capabilities and services for its customers that rely on the Azure public cloud. The company also remains staunchly focused on helping organizations with a full cloud migration path in order to achieve the greatest efficiencies.

The new services were launched this week as part of Microsoft's Ignite event in Orlando, Florida. They include a public preview of its Automate platform offered as a managed service on Azure.

Vikram Ghosh, vice president of business development for Chef’s partnerships with cloud providers, said the move was based on customers finding it hard to set up and automate an instance on Azure.

“A lot of our customers use Azure and use Automate in Azure,” Ghosh said. “They are looking for a more straight-forward way to use Automate and ongoing management tasks in running infrastructure on Azure tenants.”

Chef is also integrating its Workstation platform with Azure Cloud Shell to provide a quicker path for applying configuration changes to a user’s system from within the Azure portal. The company earlier this year launched its Workstation platform that allows users to run ad-hoc configurations on target systems.

Ghosh said the integration of Workstation in Azure Cloud Shell and the managed Chef service allows customers to, “be able to do everything on an Azure subscription without ever having to leave the Azure portal. That’s a huge value for customers.”

Chef also launched a beta version of its InSpec platform integrated with Azure to allow for compliance automation. InSpec is Chef’s platform that allows an organization to measure compliance as code. The service has been available for Amazon Web Services (AWS).

“This is our effort to make sure that customers using Azure can use our tools for infrastructure automation and work their compliance requirements natively from the Azure console,” Ghosh said.

Most of Chef’s customers rely on either AWS or Azure for their public cloud needs. “We are starting to see some [Google Cloud Platform] in our customer base,” he said, adding that the company was hoping to announce more on the topic later this year.

The company competes against a number of DevOps tool providers, including Blue Medora, CA Technologies, Puppet, Dynatrace, Jfrog, SaltStack, and the Ansible arm of Red Hat. Ghosh said Chef is different from many of its rivals in that it's focused on accelerating an organization’s cloud adoption point.

“We don’t want to become a conduit for moving everything from on prem to the cloud then just running all of that in the same way. You should not be running the same garbage you are running on prem on Azure,” Ghosh said. He added that those other companies, and even a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure, have enough platforms and support in place to deal with slower-paced migration strategies.

“Something like Azure Site Recovery is a great solution for customers that just want to migrate a [virtual machine] to Azure,” Ghosh said. “We are focused on modernizing. We bring unique value to our customers that want to grow faster and truly bring transformation to their business. Running the same stuff doesn’t allow you to gain enough leverage for that.”