Title: Out with the old, in with the new – Modernizing Application Deployment with Habitat

I created DAFNE Online, a website for people with Type 1 Diabetes back in 2008. I’d heard about this awesome new web application framework called Ruby on Rails so decided to learn that and implement the site using it, mainly because I like learning new stuff. Back then I was purely on the Dev side of DevOps and wasn’t too bothered about how the application was going to run in production, so with the aid of Google search and a few pieces of string I cobbled together a solution to get the app up and running on the web. Fast forward to 2016 and it was still running on the same basic stack – which was very outdated and required a manual effort to fix with every deployment.

Enter a new way of deployment offered by Chef called Habitat, which allowed me to keep the environment up to date and automatically deploy the application without any fix or manual effort needed. In this workshop I'll give you a hands on snapshot of the journey from the old to the new, and show how this technology can configure and deploy Rails applications with ease.

Pre-Requisites:
- Signed up for Habitat
- A Github Account
- A Docker Registry account
- A laptop installed with an OS that can reliably execute Rust and Go

About the speaker

Simon is a Solutions Architect at Chef, he has spent the past few years helping customers solve their Continuous Delivery problems with a variety of products and methods. In his spare time he also develops and maintains DAFNE Online, a site for people with Type 1 Diabetes in the UK. He also enjoys watching rugby, attempting to learn the piano, and learning how to be a new dad.