This document discusses configuration management and introduces Habitat as a solution. It notes areas for improvement like centralization, immutable infrastructure, hidden dependencies, orchestration, and toolchains. Habitat is presented as addressing these through components like Habitat Studio for packaging apps, Plans with instructions, and the Depot for storage. The Habitat Supervisor provides an intelligent runtime for deployment coordination, service discovery, and secure configuration management. Habitat aims to enable building distributed systems that are topology aware and stripping out hidden dependencies through a simplified toolchain and workflow.