When we launched Habitat last June we also announced that we had begun development of a build service which, in conjunction with the Habitat Supervisor, would round out our vision for the future of continuous integration and deployment of applications.

I’m excited to announce the launch of our new learning site for Chef practitioners, Learn Chef Rally. What exactly is Learn Chef Rally? It’s a rethinking of how we help our community of practitioners – both newbies and grizzled veterans – to start and continue learning about Chef, continuous automation, compliance, and DevOps.

We’re excited to be in Austin, TX this week for ChefConf. Today we’re hosting a Community Summit so it’s a great time to reflect on some of the amazing things the community and community engineering team at Chef completed in the first three months of the year!

In a recent blog post I briefly discussed how to build, export and run a service packaged via a Habitat plan. In this post we will take a look at running Redis and backing it up via Shield.

Heading to ChefConf? Here are some sample schedules to help you get the most out of your time in Austin! Whether you’re totally new to this whole DevOps and Chef thing, or you’re a distributed systems engineer building ultra scalable microservices with Habitat, there are sessions perfect for you.

Containers continue to take the IT world by storm and container orchestration platforms are a major part of how you build and ship software in a modern way. Kubernetes is a great example of the growth of this segment, and has emerged as one of the leaders of this space.

I’m happy to announce that GoCD is now part of the Chef Partner Cookbook Program. They have certified the GoCD Cookbook. This cookbook deploys a standard GoCD server or agent with the required settings to get it ready for your usage. GoCD is an on-premise, open source, continuous delivery tool by ThoughtWorks.

The IT industry has spoken: digital transformation is here. Having a digital transformation strategy is the difference between disrupting or being disrupted. But transformation is hard and it doesn’t happen overnight. Without clear goals, it’s difficult to know if you’re making progress when you spend your days in the tactical trenches.

(This post was originally published at Baggerspion) Early in my Habitat journey I packed a super-simple Python application that I had developed. It served no purpose other than to be packaged. Once I started to get my head around the fundamentals of packaging with Habitat, my mind turned to more useful things.