Chef Strives to Deliver Cross-Platform Nirvana with Habitat

DevOps strives to streamline development and help companies be more agile. Specific or unique constraints of one platform or another, however, sometimes get in the way and paint developers into a corner. Habitat, a new project from Chef, seeks to address that challenge by enabling code that is more portable across platforms.

Chef is an established leader in the DevOps world. Automation is a keystone of DevOps tools and processes, and Chef’s platform simplifies and streamlines automation. Chef is branching out, though, with the recent unveiling of Habitat—an open-source project to automate the applications themselves.

As companies continue to embrace DevOps and developers continue to create custom applications, it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage it all. Many organizations have infrastructures that span on-premises and cloud—some using multiple cloud platforms—and the applications have to be crafted for the specific infrastructure or platform they’re designed to run on. Habitat seeks to change that. It ostensibly allows developers to focus on the features and capabilities of the app rather than the unique constraints of a specific infrastructure or particular runtime environment.

“We must free the application from its dependency on infrastructure to truly achieve the promise of DevOps,” said Adam Jacob, co-founder and CTO of Chef. “There is so much open-source software to be written in the world and we’re very excited to release Habitat into the wild. We believe application-centric automation can give modern development teams what they really want—to build new apps, not muck around in the plumbing.”

A blog post from Chef describes the premise of Habitat:

Applications packaged with Habitat have the intelligence to self-organize and self-configure. Habitat allows the application to both be portable across independent infrastructure environments and have the intelligence to select the infrastructure features that benefit that application. This makes it easy to run applications across increasingly diverse environments such as containers, PaaS, cloud infrastructure, and on-premise data centers, while also accelerating hybrid cloud environments.

It sounds promising to Michael Glenney, solutions architect at New Context. Glenney said Habitat—if it lives up to what Chef has promised—may represent a paradigm shift in how applications are managed in a data center where configuration management (CM) is prevalent.

Check out the full post on DevOps.com: Chef Has Potential Game-Changer with Habitat.