Chef has introduced Habitat Builder, a SaaS-based service that provides the fastest way to package apps simply and consistently for deployment and management across flexible cloud-native architectures such as those comprising Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, both on-premises and in-cloud. Habitat Builder gives developers and operations teams complete control over the containerised application lifecycle.
Developers packaging applications with Habitat are not required to commit to a particular export format or runtime; that decision can be made when the applications are deployed. Habitat also provides scaffolding for popular languages such as Node.js, Java and Ruby On Rails, automatically detecting what language tooling is being used and building an artifact for the application. Deployment artifacts contain the app, as well as the libraries and dependencies it needs to run in any traditional or cloud-native architecture.
“While the application portability benefits of containers are widely recognised, lack of consistency in packaging and orchestration across the application lifecycle has, in many cases, limited the success of their deployment at scale, even when using cloud-native architectures,” said Stephen Elliot, Programme Vice President at IDC. “Separating packaging, deployment concerns, and artifacts is one strategy that can empower teams to deliver on business objectives of delivering software at speed, with high quality.”
“Habitat packaging addresses many of the complexities distributed computing app deployment introduces,” said Amulya Sharma, senior staff engineer at GE Digital. “Because we can fully package apps as a single artifact, we see a 30 percent reduction in the time it takes to create the first cluster, and 30 percent over that for subsequent clusters. It also boosts our agility by allowing us to deploy to any and all of the runtime formats and targets we use, including plain VMs, Docker, Kubernetes, Mesos and Cloud Foundry.”
"With Habitat, we have an easier onramp to packaging our apps in any environment,” said Blake Irvin, Engineer at smartB Energy Management GmbH. “The learning curve for our dev teams who are doing a little bit of ops as well as traditional software engineering is a lot less steep. The fact that we can radically simplify deployment processes by treating every service as an artifact is very powerful. Adopting Habitat means you have a reproducible, consistent method for build and deploy and you can apply that model to every service or application that you're running. Once you've learned how one service is deployed or managed, you've got everything you need to figure out the next service."
