Habitat (Chef)
Chef, the maker of a popular IT automation platform, believes the choice between "the way enterprises build software" and "the way the Big Web players build software" is a false choice. This month, Chef launched a new open-source product, dubbed Habitat, that aims to offer another way to create applications. Through providing better application automation, Habitat aims to simplify every step of the application creation process. Habitat seeks to do so by combining a new system for packaging software (which bundles all the configuration options needed by the application with the app) along with a supervisor component (which ensures that the app configuration and other essentials are coordinated correctly).