Highlights and Announcements

ChefConf 2016 was held in Austin, TX last week, and as usual, Stelligent sent a few engineers to take advantage of the learning and networking opportunities. This year’s conference was a 4 day event with a wide variety of workshops, lectures, keynote speeches, and social events. Here is a summary of the highlights and announcements.

Chef Automate

Chef Automate was one of the big announcements at ChefConf 2016. It is billed as “One platform that delivers DevOps workflow, automated compliance, and end-to-end pipeline visibility.” It brings together Chef for infrastructure automation, InSpec for compliance automation, and Habitat for application automation, and delivers a full-stack deployment pipeline along with customizable dashboards for comprehensive visibility. Chef Compliance and Chef Delivery have been phased out as stand-alone products and replaced by Chef Automate as the company’s flagship commercial offering.
Chef_Automate_–_Embrace_DevOps___Chef

Habitat

Habitat was actually announced back in June, but it was a big focus of ChefConf 2016. There were five info sessions and a Habitat Zone for networking with and learning from other community members. Habitat is an open source project that focuses on application automation and provides a packaging system that results in apps that are “immutable and atomically deployed, with self-organizing peer relationships.” Here are the key features listed on the project website:

  • Habitat is unapologetically app-centric. It’s designed with best practices for the modern application in mind.
  • Habitat gives you a packaging format and a runtime supervisor with deployment coordination and service discovery built in.
  • Habitat packages contain everything the app needs to run with no outside dependencies. They are isolated, immutable, and auditable.
  • The Habitat supervisor knows the packaged app’s peer relationships, upgrade strategy, and policies for restart and security. The supervisor is also responsible for runtime configuration and connecting to management services, such as monitoring.

Habitat packages have the following attributes:
habitat

Chef Certification

A new Chef Certification program was also announced at the conference. It is a badge-based program where passing an exam for a particular competency earns you a badge. A certification is achieved by earning all the required badges for that learning track. The program is in an early adopter phase and not all badges are available yet. Here’s what those tracks look like right now:
Chef Certified Developer
ccd
 
Chef Certified Windows Developer
ccwd
 
Chef Certified Architect
cca
 

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