Learning Habitat with the Chef Training Team

Habitat is an open-source project by Chef that moves an application’s configuration, management, and behavior to the application itself, not the infrastructure that the application runs on. Habitat provides simple and consistent ways to deploy and manage cloud-native applications.

In addition to the awesome tutorials on www.habitat.sh, the Chef training team is pleased to announce new tracks and modules on Learn Chef Rally to help you explore what Habitat can do.

Quickstart: Try Habitat

This is a great place to start your Habitat learning adventure. In this module, you’ll build and run a basic web application that includes a load balancer and two web servers on your workstation. We’ll help you build the Habitat artifacts by providing the Habitat plan, walk you through exporting your packages to Docker images, and then running the app on containers. You’ll find this experience to be a great quickstart for learning Habitat.

Building Applications with HabitatTrack: Building Applications with Habitat

Discover how Habitat’s approach to building applications enables you to turn your applications into delightful artifacts to deploy into production. You’ll learn how to write and build a plan with scaffolding down to doing it from scratch. Complete this track and earn the “Ready to Serve” badge.

You’ll find these modules in the initial release of this track:

  • Try Habitat
  • Build a web application with Habitat
  • Build a Habitat package from source
  • Build a legacy application with Habitat
  • Make your Habitat applications configurable

Deploying Apps with HabitatTrack: Deploying Applications with Habitat

Deploying an application with Habitat enables you to easily scale the technical cliff when bringing your application to production because all the configuration travels with the application and it is all managed by a supervisor. Complete this track and earn the “Packaged to Go” badge.

You’ll find these modules in the initial release of this track:

  • Try Habitat
  • Publish a web application to Docker Hub with Habitat Builder

The future is now…but it’s also tomorrow :-)

Like everyone here at Chef, the training team is very excited about Habitat. We are focused on creating new content for this project and will provide many more modules for these tracks. Here’s a preview of what you’ll find soon:

  • Build a Habitat package from source that needs patching
  • Deploying Habitat packages with Chef, with Kubernetes, and on Mesos
  • Managing secrets in an application’s configuration
  • Monitoring and upgrading an application
  • Continuous deployment through subscriptions
  • Integration with Chef Automate
  • Building in your own Builder Neighborhood

Let us know what you think about this new content. Send your feedback and suggestions to [email protected].

Thomas Petchel

Thomas is technical content lead for Chef's self-paced, online learning site: https://learn.chef.io/. Before joining Chef, Thomas developed learning content for software developers and worked as a software developer in the online gaming space. Thomas lives in Sarasota, FL with his wife and two daughters.