ChefConf is the largest Chef community gathering and educational event for teams on the journey to becoming fast, efficient, and innovative software-driven organizations. In other words, you and your team! Really!
ChefConf 2019 will take place May 20-23 in Seattle, Washington, and we want you to present! The ChefConf call for presenters (CFP) is now open.
One of the tracks you might consider proposing a session for is the Application Automation track.
The cries for digital and cultural transformation can be heard from every corner of the business world. Everyday technologists are becoming more concerned with delivering customer and business value. How are your teams empowered to deliver this value to production? Teams are adopting the tooling and practices necessary to embrace cloud-native technologies, migrate to container ecosystems, employ complex orchestrators, embrace cloud infrastructure, and investigate serverless solutions. In the meantime, some legacy applications are being lifted out of the data center and shifted to the cloud.
Application automation is the term we use to describe the processes used to build, deploy, and manage these applications.
Habitat is a simple, flexible way to build, deploy, and manage modern distributed applications and a platform to modernize and move your more “vintage” services.
Share your story of using Habitat and related technologies to manage the lifecycle of your team’s applications. Below are some ideas and questions to consider.
Topologies, service discovery, consistency, availability, partitioning, and more! Working with distributed systems means learning about new concepts and terms. The Habitat ecosystem addresses many of these concerns making it easier to implement and leverage them within applications.
Containers provide many benefits to modern application teams. Being able to run the same artifact in many different environments simplifies delivery pipelines, increases confidence, and allows teams to deliver value faster. But containers alone may not be enough. Scaling out containers and running production workloads often requires additional technologies like a container scheduler or platform as a service. Habitat provides the capability to export artifacts into a number of different formats including Docker images, Cloud Foundry images, and more. Using the Habitat builder service, you can automatically publish these containers to Docker Hub or Amazon’s Container Registry. Tell us how you’re using Habitat in a larger ecosystem:
Many applications frameworks have mature notions of packaging applications. Java applications, for example, are often packaged as .jar or .war files that are ready to be run inside of a java runtime. In other frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails, the idea of building an artifact is foreign to most of the community. Habitat allows you to create packages and simplify the deployment and management of any application framework. Not everything we build or run is an application framework, either. What about persistent data stores or other services?
The word “DevOps” has always started with “Dev” yet many participants in the community have a deep background in operations. Habitat aims to bring better automation capabilities to developers and make the DevOps tent larger so that everyone has a place. This also means more and closer collaboration between teams!
One of the powerful features of Habitat is the flexibility it gives your team for pulling older applications away from obsolete architectures and deploying them on modern hardware. Combined with Chef’s management of your infrastructure resources, modernizing and moving your legacy applications to the cloud becomes far less fraught. Are more and more organizations take advantage of the benefits of migrating to the cloud, plenty of lessons have been learned. Has your team been through a cloud migration or an effort to bring older apps into the present? Did you use Habitat to do it? Let us know!
Application automation with Habitat is a relatively new practice and the tools available are quickly evolving. How are you getting started with Habitat? Have you started with core packages or are you building your own? You do not need to be an expert to help others get started. Your experiences getting started with Habitat are worth sharing, even if as cautionary tales. ChefConf is a great place to help fellow community members get started on the right foot.
The ChefConf CFP is open for the following tracks:
Your story and experiences are worth sharing with the community. Help others learn and further your own knowledge through sharing. The ChefConf CFP is open now. Use some of the questions posed here to help form a talk proposal for the application automation track.
Submit your talk proposal now! The deadline is Friday, January 11, 2019 at 11:59 PM Pacific time.