Simplifying Container Management with Habitat

GOTO Amsterdam 2017

Containers provide a delightful development experience. It’s easy to download a container image and get started writing code. But it’s a different story when you have to run containers in production at scale. That’s when all the hidden complexities become apparent and the real challenges begin. What tools are you going to use to build, deploy, run, and manage your containerized applications? How are you going to manage difference between environments like staging and production with a fleet of immutable objects? How will you effectively scale containerized applications once you’ve deployed them?

Habitat, our open-source project for application automation, simplifies container management by packaging applications in a compact, atomic, and easily auditable format that makes it easier to deploy your application on various container runtimes. Once your applications are deployed, the Habitat supervisor simplifies the complexities of running in production environments with built-in abstractions for functions typically handled by external tooling, such as dynamic scaling and rolling updates.

In this talk I'll give a overview of Habitat, compare it with current methods used to package applications, and show how a Habitat built container reduces the complexity of running containers in production.