I apologize if this is the wrong area to ask, but what happens to Chef? Does Habitat handle those functions?
IE, we use Chef to add OS level automation (log rotations, splunk integrations, Nagios, Grafana). We still need to know when memory overruns, when kernels crash, ship logs, etc. Or in some cases install things like Cassandra in a raw VM or physical host. Are you abandoning the Chef infrastructure for this? Does this handle OS level automation? I don’t understand if this is an additional product or a replacement one?
tl;dr: Chef and Habitat solve two different problems. Chef handles infrastructure complexity. Habitat runs apps smoothly on that infrastructure.
Chef is a proven automation framework for modeling infrastructure complexity. Chef shines in infrastructure automation use cases that require flexibility, scalability, and extensibility. Chef is good at solving the complex problems you face when developing in an infrastructure-first approach.
Habitat is different. Habitat aims to introduce a forward-thinking application-first approach that defers decisions about infrastructure complexity. “Application-first” means that Habitat enables an appdev model where infrastructure decisions can be made at runtime. But that underlying infrastructure still needs to be configured. Compliance on that infrastructure is still a real concern. We believe that Habitat enables a more delightful app dev experience than what other tools provide today. Chef is still useful for managing infrastructure as code. Inspec is still useful for managing compliance policy as code. Those tools continue to solve the problems for which they were created to solve. We encourage you to try Habitat for application management to see if its app-first approach is right for you.