Cloudy Journey: Application Automation with Habitat and Kubernetes

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Application Automation with Habitat and Kubernetes
// Chef Blog

Habitat, Chef's next generation application automation framework, provides a powerful suite of integrated capabilities in service of seamlessly and continuously building, deploying, and running your application and the services that need to run to support and scale your application across a distributed infrastructure.

With Kubecon kicking off today in Austin, we are super excited to highlight a bunch of product capabilities built in partnership with our friends at Kinvolk that blend the edges of Habitat and Kubernetes to unify these two powerful tools and ecosystems into one awesome application delivery experience.

Kubernetes is a platform that runs containerized applications and supports container scheduling, orchestration, and service discovery. It allows you to abstract a datacenter of computers into well managed compute resources to power your workloads as you continuously update and scale them. When you use Habitat with Kubernetes, Habitat manages the application building, packaging, and deployment, and then Kubernetes manages the infrastructure, container scheduling, orchestration, and service discovery.

The end goal of using Habitat and Kubernetes together is to power your developers to be able to continuously build and deploy application artifacts using Habitat's Builder automation. These artifacts will automatically deploy to their Kubernetes staging clusters, and when ready, developers can promote application updates to the production clusters simply by running hab pkg promote --production my/software/1.2.3/20171201134501.

Towards this, today we are announcing some major updates to our Habitat Operator for Kubernetes, including the ability to promote application artifacts between clusters as part of your continuous delivery practice.

We have fully supported Kubernetes packages hosted at Habitat Builder, so you can build and deploy your Kubernetes clusters and update them as Kubernetes is updated, using Habitat's Builder capabilities. This lets you take advantage of Habitat's immutable build guarantees of reproducibility, isolation, portability, and atomicity to run your cluster wherever you need to.

We are also introducing a Habitat Kubernetes exporter to add to our exporter options. This means you can export all of your Habitat built artifacts using `hab pkg export kubernetes` and create a docker container with a Kubernetes manifest that can be deployed to a Kubernetes cluster running the Habitat Operator.