Enforcing security policy is tough, especially in a Windows environment where you are NOT using Group Policy. Think about usage patterns for Windows server on cloud. GPO certainly doesn’t always apply.
Tech Days NL ran on thr 4th and 5th of October 2016 at the RAI centre in Amsterdam. It was a great event with an amazing number of tracks running in parallel.
InSpec is an opensource language that can be used to assess the state of systems. It can form integration tests, but more importantly, with additional meta information, can create so called compliance profiles.
The Chef DK includes a tool called Knife. This is primarily used for interaction with remote resources in Chef, such as the Chef Server and Chef managed nodes, but can be used for managing other remote systems too.
Using knife to bootstrap a node to be managed with Chef is a fundamental part of the Chef workflow, especially for dev and test purposes. When you bootstrap a node you are preparing the node to communicate with the Chef Server so it can download the cookbooks and recipes you have defined in its run-list, and eventually match the state you have defined in your Chef code.
Recently I was lucky enough to take part in a ‘hackathon’ with Chef, Microsoft and a partner company based in Norway. It was a great week working with some amazing people!