Here’s this month’s round up of what happened in August across the Chef, Habitat, and InSpec open-source communities. Chef This month’s release of Chef Client 14.4 is the newest in the Chef 14 series, and includes seven new preview resources, many improvements to existing resources, and a brand new Knife profile management command.

“If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe”, and if you wish to build an app using the interpreted language framework of your choice, you usually have to install a whole universe of dependencies.

Summary If you use the VMware ecosystem in your day to day job, you may have seen the incubation InSpec project inspec-vmware and got excited about the possibilities of running InSpec tests against your VMware Software Defined Data Centers (SDDC)s and VMware on AWS.

Sensu 2.0 and Habitat are both modern distributed systems, one for monitoring, the other for application packaging and deployment.

Audits are stressful. If your organization is subject to regulatory compliance rules, chances are you’ve experienced firsthand how time-consuming and painful they can be.

The world of application packaging and deployment can be viewed as a spectrum where at one end we have hand-crafted installation/run scripts on physical infrastructure and on the other are fully containerized applications making the most of cloud-native services.

Two years ago, Chef launched Habitat as a way to enable application teams to build, deploy, and manage any application in any environment.

On Wednesday, August 1, we presented a webinar on using InSpec with Cisco IOS network devices. Today, fewer than 10% of network teams are using any automation tools, yet through the NetOps 2.

Habitat can seem like magic – allowing you to deploy and manage any app, anywhere, in the same way. It’s not magic, however, it’s deliberate, very well thought out technology. In Habitat, the application itself is the unit of automation.