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.

Last week, Chef announced Chef Automate 1.6, which provides significant new capabilities to help organizations reduce risk, improve efficiency, and increase speed.

I build a lot of websites, and until somewhat recently, my workflow would usually go something like this: Have an idea. Build a website. Fumble through getting version 1 of the website out into the world.

The dog days of summer are upon us making it a great time to stay inside with the air-conditioning to focus on developing your IT automation and DevOps skills.

Velocity increasingly drives the modern IT landscape. The convenience of being able to control nearly every aspect of our lives from the phones in our pockets brings with it an expectation that the companies and services we patronize and depend on evolve to meet our needs at breakneck speed.

For the past several months we have been working hard to provide full feature parity accross all Habitat components on Windows. We often use an ASP.NET Core plan to test Windows functionality because building and running a .

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

Verisk Analytics is a leading data analytics organization and a Chef customer. Eric Schneider, Verisk’s CTO, currently has his team focused on executing a cloud migration strategy and modernizing legacy applications. Eric recently sat down with us to discuss how Chef is helping them execute on those objectives, and how Verisk’s implementation has evolved over time.