Habitat

Habitat is an open-source application automation technology originally launched by Chef in 2016 and now part of Progress Software's portfolio following its acquisition of Chef in October 2020. The project was co-founded by Chef's then CTO, Adam Jacob. Habitat was developed to address the complexities of deploying and managing applications across diverse infrastructure environments, including bare metal, virtual machines, containers, and PaaS solutions. The core of Habitat's offering is to package applications with their automation, making them self-organizing and self-configuring. This approach effectively decouples the application from the underlying infrastructure, allowing it to be portable and run consistently anywhere without significant refactoring. Habitat creates platform-independent build artifacts that bundle the application with all its dependencies, configuration, and lifecycle management instructions. The resulting immutable package, a .HART file, contains everything the application needs to run, which reduces the complexity of managing containerized applications as they move from development to production. Habitat is comprised of several key components. The Habitat Studio provides an isolated, clean-room environment for packaging applications and validating their artifacts. A core element is the Habitat Supervisor, a lightweight agent that runs alongside the application in any environment. The Supervisor manages the application's entire lifecycle, including startup, runtime configuration, updates, and health monitoring, based on the instructions defined within the package. Packages are stored and distributed via Habitat Builder, which can be used as a public SaaS offering or an on-premise depot. The business model centers on commercial support for Habitat's components, which are integrated into the Progress Chef platform, including the Chef Enterprise Automation Stack. This targets enterprise clients in the DevOps and DevSecOps markets who require robust infrastructure automation. The technology is particularly beneficial for modernizing legacy workloads and for new applications where the final deployment infrastructure may be uncertain or subject to change. With the release of Chef Habitat 2.0 in March 2026, the platform introduced support for Linux ARM (aarch64) architecture, upgraded its PowerShell version for improved performance, and made other modernizing updates. Keywords: application automation, infrastructure independent, DevOps, DevSecOps, package management, configuration management, continuous delivery, application deployment, Chef Habitat, Progress Chef, open source, container orchestration, immutable infrastructure, application portability, microservices deployment, cloud native, .HART files, Habitat Supervisor, Habitat Builder