Configuration management processes tools

By using tools to codify our build process, we make it easy for other developers to understand how our artifacts are modified and created, which is a form of configuration management. Where to start? Do you begin by researching tools? Implementing some automation? Auditing your existing servers? Talking to others in your company? Where you start with anything always depends on where you currently are. That said, only you are aware of your current situation and the limitations and resources available.

Below are three different places you can begin your journey to effective configuration management:. Hopefully that helps to clear things up for you about configuration management. There are many ways to implement configuration management, and there are lots of different tools and processes. So when it comes to strategy, be sure to take your time assessing options and understanding how you want your configuration management processes to work.

It will all be worth it in the end, though. Get your configuration management right and your teams will be safer, more productive, and faster to make changes! Lou is a JavaScript full stack engineer with a passion for culture, approach, and delivery. He believes the best products emerge from high performing teams and practices. Lou is a fan and advocate of old-school lean and systems thinking, XP, continuous delivery, and DevOps.

Reading time 13 minutes Configuration management is an increasingly important foundation for a successful tech platform. The benefits of configuration management. How configuration management fits with concepts like DevOps and agile. How you can get started with configuration management. Sound good? What Is Configuration Management? Comprehensive test environment management with Plutora Centralize bookings, resolve conflicts, and track system dependencies.

Learn More. Red Hat works with the greater open source community on automation technologies. Our engineers help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure your business and IT performs and remains stable and secure. As with all open source projects, Red Hat contributes code and improvements back to the upstream codebase—sharing advancements along the way. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes all the tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, including playbooks, a visual dashboard, and analytics.

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Configuration management is a necessary tool for managing complex software systems. Lack of configuration management can cause serious problems with reliability, uptime, and the ability to scale a system. Many current software development tools have configuration management features built in. While Ian has broad and deep experience with both Java and. NET, he's best known as a champion of agile methods in large enterprises. He's currently focused on the emerging DevOps culture and the tools for enabling better continuous integration, continuous delivery, and data analysis.

During his career, he's successfully managed enterprise software development tools in all phases of their lifecycle. He has driven organization-wide process improvement with results of greater productivity, higher quality, and improved customer satisfaction.

He has built multi-national teams that value self-direction and self-organization. When not speaking or coding, you can find Ian indulging his passions in parsers, meta-programming, and domain-specific languages. Follow Ian at devpartisan. Value stream mapping is an analysis technique that can help optimize your continuous delivery pipeline. Learn how and why this technique is used. DevSecOps describes a security-focused, continuous delivery, software development life cycle.

DevSecOps builds on the best practices of DevOps. Continuous delivery Principles Configuration management. Configuration management How configuration management helps engineering teams build robust and stable systems.

Ian Buchanan. Continuous Delivery Principles. Continuous Delivery Pipeline What is Continuous Integration. Software testing for continuous delivery. What Is Continuous Deployment?

Microservices and Microservices Architecture. Continuous Delivery articles. What is configuration management? Why is configuration management important? Endpoints that specify external connections to other services, databases, or domains Secrets like passwords and encryption keys. DevOps configuration management. There's a famous commercial about an auto mechanic talking about a costly engine repair that could have been avoided if the owner had replace his oil filter.

The mechanic says:. You can avoid the costs associated with configuration management by not employing it at all, however you will likely pay in:.

Configuration management is included as a key systems engineering practice because it works! It keeps you from incurring costs preventatively and helps IT stop fire fighting. Moreover, good systems engineers have learned, through practical experience, that it pays for itself many times over.

Use configuration management to focus on fire prevention , not fire fighting. The financial markets felt the impact even beyond the NYSE trading floor. A new software installation caused the problem. The NYSE had installed the software on 8 of its 20 trading terminals, and the system was tested the night before go-live. However, on the morning of June 8th, a total of 8 installations failed to operate correctly. The NYSE tried to switch back to its old software, but was unable to do so before the opening of the trading session.

Other than some red faces at the NYSE, the damage was minimized. Had the outage continued for longer than 90 minutes, the repercussions would have been much more severe.

Firstly, you will need a configuration management system. The configuration management systems marketplace changes frequently, and there are many different solutions out there, ranging from open source projects to commercial off the shelf technology sold by the likes of Microsoft and IBM. Open source systems have come a long way , so despite paying for a vendor's logo and sales team, it is not always value for money to go with a big vendor. The second cost of configuration management is people, including staff often contractors, if your internal capability is immature with the skills to set up configuration management processes and tools.

You will also need to factor in training of your existing staff to integrate ongoing configuration management processes into your business. Some of the financial benefits contributing to positive ROI results found in leveraging configuration management include:.

There are plenty of ROI calculations that you can apply for your business. The metric is cost avoidance in areas such as:. The benefits of configuration management flow into all these activities. These activities take time, and time is money. There are many popular configuration management tools, which makes it hard to find a tool or stack of tools that meet the system configuration needs of your organization.

The essential features and tradeoffs you need to consider include performance, always key for scaling a data center, compatibility with existing systems, ease of use, enterprise support and cybersecurity. When it comes to market share, tools like Ansible , Puppet and Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager have sizable communities but there are only great alternatives in the CM space.

OpsWorks automates patching, updating, and configuration of servers using Chef and Puppet. These tools have many commonalities and overlapping features that provide advantages over managing configuration management by hand, including infrastructure-as-code approaches that make it easy to rollout updates and change infrastructure. In addition, these configuration management tools help you keep a record of your assets and understand the exact state across all your servers and other networked assets.

The areas of configuration management, data management and control are fraught with risks, from the possibility of disruptions to application availability, as well as data loss or corruption. To ensure your organization's assets are highly available and configured optimally, use these best practices:.

Changesets are packaged commits that track changes to a group of files, directory structure, reasons for change, unit test comments and environment changes in one easy to manage commit. This allows build managers to see which related files have changed with every significant change to your assets, making it easier to roll back unwanted changes or revert to an earlier configuration if needed.

This will help you post problems early before they occur in production and prove costly. Without a definition of the problem in your repository, future reviewers won't know what was fixed and if the fix worked, leading to the potential for code conflicts and subtle bugs.

I ncludes the evaluation of all change-requests and change-proposals, and their subsequent approval or disapproval. It covers the process of controlling modifications to the system's design, hardware, firmware, software, and documentation.