The buzz at ChefConf, this past week, was all around the Habitat project. This open source project brings a deployment layer to developers, allowing them to package up their applications as just about anything under the sun. Considering that Chef remains a popular path to configuration management and environment configuration, adding this new unified deployment preparation layer brings developers even more exciting ways to automate their continuous integration and deployment processes.

"I describe it, personally, as two things. The first is a packaging system. What you do is, you create a plan file for your application, you write the application first, and then that plan file defines in Bash for Linux and Powershell for Windows how exactly that app should be built, installed, and run. The wonderful thing is that gets packaged into a HART artifact, because we heart you, though it actually means Habitat Artifact. That package can be exported to almost anything. It can be exported into a Docker container. That's by far the most popular exporter that people use," said Nell Shamrell-Harrington, senior development engineer at Chef.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yQRixcCmXc