Development automation giant Chef Software Inc. has cooked up another product for speeding up application projects.

Unveiled this morning, Habitat Builder is a new cloud service designed to reduce the amount of work involved in pushing code to production. It’s derived from a similarly named command-line tool that Chef launched last year. The offering applies the same basic concept as Docker, the lightweight container technology that developers are increasingly using to deploy their software across various computer environments.

Habitat Builder can turn an application into a tightly integrated package that works with different kinds of infrastructure. Where the tool starts diverging from Docker is the way those packages are built. According to Chef, developers can have their source code bundled with configuration files, libraries and everything else the workload requires to run.

Habitat Builder deploys the user-supplied components alongside an agent dubbed Supervisor that kicks into action once the application is in production. It can carry out tests to ensure everything is working as intended, implement updates and perform other common maintenance tasks.

Chef said Habitat Builder thus streamlines code delivery a great deal. Instead of having to configure the underlying infrastructure manually, application teams can simply bundle their code with the necessary components and deploy the package. The service supports environments based on Docker, the popular Cloud Foundry middleware stack and a variety of other platforms. 

Habitat Builder should be particularly appealing to companies that use a mix of different technologies across their infrastructure. The service’s packaging mechanism can eliminate much of the overlapping work historically involved in deploying an application to multiple environments, for example to both an on-premises data center and Amazon Web Services.

Habitat Builder also lends itself to migrating existing in-house workloads to the cloud. The service enables companies to re-assemble an application and its components for an off-premises environment with fewer steps than what the process has historically involved.  

Habitat Builder is currently available in preview for free.

Image: Unsplash