[Video] What is Chef Habitat?

Chef Habitat creates platform-independent build artifacts and provides built-in deployment and management capabilities. It helps teams automate the application lifecycle. Watch this video to learn more:

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James: Habitat by Chef is a way to describe your application. Typically, when we look in the past what we’ve done is that we build applications by starting at the infrastructure level. We go and get virtual machines or bare metal boxes, or cloud images and we layer on an operating system, we configure that and then we put the application on top. Habitat flips it on its head.

What Habitat does is it starts with the application and lets a developer describe the set of dependencies of that application and how to configure it. And that configuration gets packaged with the application and travels through its entire life cycle.

Damith: The application dependencies travel with the application, so if your application needs to run on Java, or it requires a specific web server or an application server, all of those became dependencies of the application.

So it all moves together through your DevOps pipeline, right, into all the different environments, and so there’s no more of this, “Oh, I’m going to configure a web server, app server, in a specific way.” It’s now part of your application.

James: This is again about speed. So it allows the developer to create really strong boundaries around their code. APIs in contrast to their operations team, to their CICD system. So it allows them to codify all this up front and then as a standard, repeatable way of deploying any application to any environment.