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This is the first I've heard about Chef Habitat in a few years. I'm curious about why you chose it. Also, how do you configure new VMs? Do you have a custom mac

This is the first I've heard about Chef Habitat in a few years. I'm curious about why you chose it. Also, how do you configure new VMs? Do you have a custom machine image, or do you use a stock image and have a startup script (via EC2 user data) that sets it up? I've spent a little time looking at Habitat docs, and I find it unfortunate that they're trying so hard to jump on the container bandwagon when apparently it also works well on bare metal or VMs.

gfodor 7y ago
Our project was greenfield 2.5 years ago, and in evaluating the ecosystem we ran into the work going on w Habitat after trying to figure out if there was a VM-analog to the stuff going on with k8s and containers (which was a very scary prospect to dive into.) Habitat seems to be a good tech stack for solving a variety of operational problems that you typically pull different products off the shelf and duct tape together -- particularly if you are focused on VMs. It was a bit of a bumpy ride but the product has stabilized enough we have confidence in it and it turns out to be quite a good fit for the self hosting use-case. Basically, it's an all-in-one solution for packaging, isolation, service discovery, configuration management, and deploys. So it was relatively easy to transition our production deployment bits to a packaged up deployed solution to 3rd party servers, with all of the bells and whistles. Our setup is a fairly minimal custom AMI that just installs the basic package dependencies for Habitat and configures the supervisor. Everything else is bootstrapped within Habitat, including our own proprietary configuration management service which allows a nice web-based GUI for configuring the ring state. The user data script just does some basic UNIX setup and DNS initialization and then does a bunch of Habitat service loads. By abstracting over all configuration via Habitat, a unified interface exists for configuring all the services across all the machines, regardless of their underlying configuration management approach, programming language, conventions, etc.

gfodor 7y ago

Our project was greenfield 2.5 years ago, and in evaluating the ecosystem we ran into the work going on w Habitat after trying to figure out if there was a VM-analog to the stuff going on with k8s and containers (which was a very scary prospect to dive into.) Habitat seems to be a good tech stack for solving a variety of operational problems that you typically pull different products off the shelf and duct tape together -- particularly if you are focused on VMs. It was a bit of a bumpy ride but the product has stabilized enough we have confidence in it and it turns out to be quite a good fit for the self hosting use-case. Basically, it's an all-in-one solution for packaging, isolation, service discovery, configuration management, and deploys. So it was relatively easy to transition our production deployment bits to a packaged up deployed solution to 3rd party servers, with all of the bells and whistles. Our setup is a fairly minimal custom AMI that just installs the basic package dependencies for Habitat and configures the supervisor. Everything else is bootstrapped within Habitat, including our own proprietary configuration management service which allows a nice web-based GUI for configuring the ring state. The user data script just does some basic UNIX setup and DNS initialization and then does a bunch of Habitat service loads. By abstracting over all configuration via Habitat, a unified interface exists for configuring all the services across all the machines, regardless of their underlying configuration management approach, programming language, conventions, etc.