Those who have been involved in converting a home-grown system to one in which strict compliance rules are observed knows the pain involved. Whereas previously a laissez-faire atmosphere ruled the day, all of a sudden, a rigid structure with many requirements and conditions regulate the administrator’s work, often with far-reaching consequences. The sheer volume of regulations alone can make moving forward difficult. If a quick fix is needed in an emergency, compliance rules often provide for exceptions, but they do need to be replaced by the right solutions looking forward.
InSpec, from the developer of Chef, promises to run compliance tests automatically and regularly on target systems with tests you define in a human-readable language that avoids the need to learn an overly elaborate syntax. InSpec describes itself as a framework for auditing and testing. First and foremost, it’s all about acid testing the existing automated system to determine whether the system and the services running on it are configured in line with policies. The slogan is “Compliance as Code.”
Having a tool for automated compliance testing come from the same company that also has the Chef automation tool in its portfolio makes a lot of sense.
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