Amazon’s ECS (EC2 Container Service) provides a compelling offering to developers and operators who are already very comfortable with AWS and its tooling. In this series of posts I explore deployment strategies for Containerized applications built using Habitat on ECS. The mission: Taking an application stack from “works on my laptop” to “works in production”.

Automation Drives Velocity The world has changed, and with it so too has the way we do business. We now can manage nearly every aspect of our day-to-day lives from our phones. Therefore, convenience has become the currency companies use to attract customers.

We are pleased to announce the release of two new integrations with VMware on AWS! We have created both knife-vcenter and kitchen-vcenter to take advantage of VMware on AWS and help drive your developers’ stories. Leverage kitchen-vcenter to drive your cookbook development in AWS, and promote it to your Software Defined Data Center (SDDC).

One of the defining characteristics of Habitat is the packaging technology. Packaging is in no way a new concept. Operating System vendors have solved this problem for sometime using tools like RPM, Debian Packages, Yum, Apt, etc.

The Chef Community Summit is a gathering of professionals interested in advancing the state of the art of Continuous Automation with Chef. This October, we will be hosting three Community Summits. They will be held in Seattle October 2-3, in New York City October 5-6, and in London October 10-11.

As the environments we manage grow, so too does the potential risk to our systems as new vulnerabilities and exploits seem to crop up on a regular basis. As such, a question folks frequently ask is, “how can I use Chef to apply patches to the systems I manage?

With the changes in EU regulation that GDPR introduces, specifically relating to the processing of EU citizens’ personal data, organisations are facing fresh challenges in how they prove compliance. GDPR brings particular burdens with the ‘Privacy by Design’ mandate, that requires data privacy be part of the system design process from day one.

One of the best parts of managing software with Habitat is its flexibility. We can use it to run a rails application in a container, virtual machine, or on bare metal. We can also run that application’s database on a container, virtual machine, bare metal, or even a cloud database service like Amazon RDS.

Part Automation, Part Culture When you think about your technology choices, its important to consider how those choices will impact the overall goals of the organization and not just one team. The tools you choose should reinforce the behaviors you want to see. Ultimately, this new way of working transforms your culture.