Chef Habitat provides automation capabilities for defining, packaging, and delivering applications to almost any environment with any operating system, on any platform. Over the last year, we’ve seen organizations like Alaska Airlines, Rakuten, Walmart, and Rizing address a broad range of application delivery automation challenges with Habitat. They’ve improved their developers’ productivity, reduced deployment failures, and are delivering applications consistently across a variety of platforms and technologies.
We’re excited to kick off 2020 by announcing the general availability (GA) of Chef Habitat 1.5. Habitat is for enterprises who need an application automation solution for both cloud and on-premises deployments, and who want to ensure that their applications are delivered successfully and securely at enterprise scale.
This release also delivers on our vision of providing Chef customers with a unified solution (Chef Enterprise Automation Stack) for infrastructure, security, and application automation. Both the Habitat Builder installer and the application dashboard are integrated with Chef Automate, providing a seamless experience for the entire automation stack.
Chef Habitat 1.5 includes several new features. Below are a few of the highlights.
Deliver Applications in Secure Environments Behind the Firewall
Habitat Builder stores application packages and their dependencies. It also provides an API so that clients can find and download the necessary packages to run their applications. Builder is offered as a cloud service that contains hundreds of pre-built applications and core dependencies, which makes it easy to get started with Habitat. But once deployed in production, many customers need an instance of Builder running on their premises with their application source code.
Chef Habitat 1.5 now has a simple way to install your own Builder instance on premises. It allows you to use the same installer as Chef Automate, and it’s integrated with Automate’s single sign-on service and backup/restore tools. To install Builder on premises, see the Installing Habitat Builder documentation.
The new release also gives you the ability to easily bring the pre-built application packages and dependencies from the Builder service to your on-prem instance or between multiple on-prem instances. For more information about the Habitat on-premises builder, read “Chef Habitat Product Announcement – Builder On-Prem Enhancements that Extend Support to Airgap Environments and Simplify Set-Up” by Salim Alam.
Visibility and Validation in Chef Automate
Chef Automate shows you information about your infrastructure configuration with Chef Infra, your compliance status with Chef InSpec, and now provides insight into your application services as well. By combining this data in a single dashboard, you have visibility for your entire Enterprise Automation Stack.
The new Applications tab in Chef Automate shows the service groups and instances that are deployed, and gives you the data you need to understand what’s deployed where and the health of each service. To start using this, you’ll need to configure the event streaming service for Habitat.
Improvements for Stability, Manageability and Performance
In addition to those great features above, we’ve made a ton of enhancements in the stability and performance of the Habitat Supervisor, made it easier to configure and manage, and improved support for Windows applications.
If you’re new to Chef Habitat, check out the Habitat tracks on Learn Chef Rally, or contact us to schedule a demo. Existing customers can upgrade to Habitat 1.5 today.
Register for our live webinar on February 27th to learn more.
