Chef, a provider of continuous automation software and one of the founders of the DevOps movement, has announced the availability of its Habitat Builder solution – a SaaS-based service that would provide a fast 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 would give developers and operations teams complete control over the containerized application lifecycle.
Developers packaging applications with Habitat Builder 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 recognized, 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, Program 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.”
Chef Habitat Builder offers the following services for cloud native operations:
- Build Service – Offers simple and consistent packaging and build capabilities that produce immutable build artifacts explicitly declaring all build- and run-time dependent libraries, exposed services/ports, and other configuration
- Artifact Store – Provides public and private repos to hold versions of packaged artifacts ready for deployment to desired architectures including TAR, Docker, CloudFoundry and Kubernetes
- Application Supervision – Would enable consistent management capabilities -runtime lifecycle, configuration updates, clustering topologies and update strategies – through the Habitat Supervisor, regardless of target environment
Habitat Builder provides native integration with Github for source code and with Docker Hub for container format export with more integrations to follow. It also includes a native operator for Kubernetes that enables simple export of Habitat packages into a cluster, along with a container exporter for Cloud Foundry that injects Cloud Foundry defaults into Habitat-run services. These allow for “easy” extension and integration with internal PaaS.
“While some existing tools are great for getting started with containers, modern app teams need to be able to package and deploy apps across multiple traditional, and cloud native architectures,” said Marc Holmes, vice president of marketing, Chef. “We developed Habitat Builder to enable developers to package apps in a consistent way, and enable operations to choose appropriate deployment targets, bringing the team closer together through a clear separation of concerns.”
