Automation tool provider Chef has made Habitat 1.5 generally available, focusing on integration with the rest of the portfolio and more options when working on-premises.

The tool meant to help automating the application lifecycle is also said to have become easier to configure, while sporting a more stable Habitat Supervisor. Users dealing with Windows applications are meanwhile promised better support for this specific scenario.

In the announcement accompanying the release, Chef product manager Mike Krasnow especially highlights the newly added option to install Habitat Builder on-premises. Builder is used to store application packages and dependencies, and was initially available as a cloud service only. Since enterprise customers are Chef’s main audience and love themselves a good local setup for added security, however, it can now be installed via the Chef Automate installer as well. 

Besides some hardware and operating system prerequisites, users interested in bootstrapping Builder need to have a public Builder account and an outward bound HTTPS connection. Before taking it to production, the docs ask companies to contact one of their representatives, though.

The second notable change of the release isn’t so much about Habitat itself, but its integration with Chef Automate. According to Krasnow, this delivers on the company’s “vision of providing Chef customers with a unified solution (Chef Enterprise Automation Stack) for infrastructure, security, and application automation”.

Product-wise this means that Automate now provides an Application tab, showing which service groups and instances are deployed, if Habitat’s event streaming service is properly configured. The dashboard also informs about the state each service is in, signaling which ones are healthy and which could do with some maintenance.