Brittany Woods

Automation Engineer, CARFAX: Automation Insights and Compliance Validation with Chef and ServiceNow

Supernova Award Category: 

Digital Safety, Governance, and Privacy

The Organization: 

CARFAX is the leading source of vehicle history information for buyers and sellers of used cars, with the most comprehensive vehicle history database available in North America. CARFAX has a comprehensive vehicle history database for buyers and sellers of used cars in North America. Millions of consumers trust CARFAX to provide them with vehicle history information every year. CARFAX receives information from more than 100,000 data sources including every U.S. and Canadian provincial motor vehicle agency plus many auto auctions, fire and police departments, collision repair facilities, fleet management and rental agencies, and more.

The Problem: 

CARFAX needed a unified platform to automate configuration management and compliance across thousands of nodes. This enables them to ensure maximum uptime for their consumers, both dealer and individual, accelerating growth of their customers’ businesses.

The Solution: 

CARFAX needed to increase the speed with which they could deliver infrastructure that was both fully configured and secure. CARFAX also needed to ensure systems were built to enable self-service models, enabling scale, ensuring dev teams and ultimately customer satisfaction.

The Results: 

Chef Infra allows CARFAX to standardize build and configuration processes. Chef InSpec enables quick confirmation of compliant nodes and protection from vulnerabilities. Chef Automate’s notification engine integrates with ServiceNow, giving teams insight into how Chef cookbooks are performing over time. When a cookbook fails, ServiceNow creates an incident for the responsible team to address, ensuring a linear and scalable workflow.

Metrics: 

By standardizing and centralizing configuration and compliance, CARFAX was able to: 

  • Use Chef Infra to reduce the time to complete a new server build task from days to minutes, and bring engineering and developers closer together, accelerating iteration and innovation
  • Reduce time and effort required to audit server level information from days to seconds with Chef InSpec 
  • Gain visibility into useful metrics from the Chef Automate integration with ServiceNow, reducing time spent filtering alerts and giving CARFAX compliance validation assurance
The Technology: 

Chef Infra automates infrastructure configuration, ensuring every system is configured correctly and consistently. Chef InSpec provides a language for describing security and compliance rules that can be shared between software engineers, operations, and security engineers. Chef Automate is an enterprise platform that allows developers, operations and security engineers to collaborate effortlessly on delivering application & infrastructure changes at the speed of business. 

Disruptive Factor: 

CARFAX receives information from more than 100,000 data sources and in order to be the leading source of vehicle history information for buyers and sellers of used cars, they need a comprehensive, stable, secure vehicle history database available. CARFAX needed a unified platform to automate configuration management and compliance across thousands of nodes. Doing so enables them to ensure maximum uptime for their consumers, both dealer and individual, accelerating growth of their customers’ businesses. Chef Infra allows CARFAX to standardize build and configuration processes. Chef InSpec enables quick confirmation of compliant nodes and protection from vulnerabilities. Chef Automate’s notification engine integrates with ServiceNow, giving teams insight into how Chef cookbooks are performing over time. When a cookbook fails, ServiceNow creates an incident for the responsible team to address, ensuring a linear, scalable workflow.

“When using InSpec for the first time, there isn’t a learning curve because it’s human-readable. A member of our security team, new to InSpec, looked at profile and could say ‘I know exactly what this is doing.” - Brittany Woods, Automation Engineer, CARFAX

Shining Moment: 

In this webinar, Nick Rycar, Sr. Technical Product Marketing Manager at Chef, and Brittany Woods, Automation Engineer at CARFAX, discuss the benefits of using Chef and ServiceNow together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=rLi3qbKhaTk&feature=emb_...

Interview with Brittany Woods: Quality Through Collaboration at CARFAX With Chef Automate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm8vm8HJOAU&feature=emb_logo 

About CARFAX: Automation Insights and Compliance Validation with Chef and ServiceNow

CARFAX helps millions of people every day confidently shop, buy, service and sell used cars with innovative solutions powered by CARFAX vehicle history information. The expert in vehicle history since 1984, CARFAX owns the world’s largest vehicle history database and is nationally recognized as a top workplace by The Washington Post and Glassdoor.com.