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What is Configuration Management?
System engineering and information technology both depend on the concept of configuration management. It is crucial for effectively managing the information interchange and procedures involved in creating goods and services, particularly those pertaining to software. Your IT responsibilities can be optimized, and your workplace systems can be made more effective, by having a solid understanding of configuration management. This article explains the rationale behind configuration management and lists the essential components of configuration management systems. System-level design presents a number of difficulties, making configuration management crucial. It is challenging enough to oversee hardware and software development projects separately. It is a challenging problem to solve to be able to manage all the relationships between the two disciplines while also taking scheduling, security, and distribution issues into mind.
1. SolarWinds
One of the tools used for managing software configuration changes that detects and compares configuration changes to servers, applications, and databases is the server configuration monitor. The application and server can both be configured in real-time, i.e. In addition to assisting with the configuration of Windows and Linux Baseline servers and applications, SolarWinds offers server configuration monitors that may spot unapproved configuration changes on servers and software. It decreases the amount of time spent troubleshooting and increases the team's accountability. its Key Features consist of, Its purpose is to identify variations between configurations. In close to real-time, SolarWinds Server Configuration Monitor offers alerts and reports of baseline deviations.
2. Ansible
Ansible uses the Infrastructure as Code service model to automate infrastructure configuration, application deployment, and cloud provisioning. DevOps engineers can utilise Ansible to automate infrastructure, apps, networks, and container environments. This utility is frequently used by engineers to automate and configure servers. Through predefined playbooks, this solution reduces the workload of repetitive infrastructure administration activities. In this context, a playbook is a straightforward YAML script file that lists the tasks the Ansible automation engine should perform. The operations team can establish machine groups that can be acted upon by specific tasks using Ansible automation, and they can also manage how machines behave in real-world settings.
3. CFEngine
For large-scale IT systems, including unified administration of systems, servers, mobile devices, and networks, CFEngine is a prominent configuration management platform that can enable automated maintenance and configuration. It is regarded as the best option for process and task administration, configuration, and patch management and is offered as both a commercial software product and an open-source application. It is highly scalable, secure, efficient, and readily available. This tool is frequently chosen by developers who want to handle configurations more quickly in both large and small deployments. It is beneficial to automatically apply updates and modifications to nodes as necessary. Organizations like Orange, Linked In, PayPal, Locaweb, and others have benefited from CFEngine.
4. Chef
You may manage server configurations and other computing resources with Chef as a DevOps tool. Agents like Chef Infra are used in Chef's infrastructure management strategy to automate infrastructure configuration. It's easy to integrate Chef into automation workflows. Several nodes can be launched with a few clicks. Configuration management "recipes" are established by DevOps teams. The materials and software programmes required for server configuration are described in the recipes. Cookbooks, Chef servers, and Nodes are Chef's primary building blocks for setups and automation.
5. Puppet
IT administrators register system components using the open-source Puppet configuration tool, which is also used to create dependency libraries and continuously find new information. It's declarative language, which is similar to JSON, is written in Ruby, and it stores data in that format. It may be scaled up to accommodate both big and small businesses' demands. Numerous enterprises exist all across the world, like Google, Red Hat, Siemens, Harvard Law School, Cisco, Cognizant, etc. Its source code is enhanced by a sizable user base. With good documentation and community support, Puppet is mostly used for large infrastructures. It is built on Ruby and makes use of an adaptable domain scripting language that is simple to execute on any platform that supports Ruby.
6. AWS OpsWorks
The deployment, configuration, and management of distributed applications can be automated using the AWS OpsWorks service. It executes a variety of operations automatically, including installing packages, configuring databases, configuring software, expanding servers, etc. Scale applications according to time or load, and behave according to the availability of resources and the permissions that have been granted. Chef and Puppet instances are controlled via the configuration management service AWS OpsWorks. The ability to specify application architecture and resource parameters is offered by OpsWorks Stacks.
7. Saltstack
An extensible configuration management and orchestration solution is Saltstack. Salt is a configuration management framework that DevOps teams use to remotely execute configurations and orchestrate events to manage IT environments like data centres. Salt configuration management framework relies on states and configuration files to demonstrate how an IT Infrastructure is provisioned and deployed. The configuration files outline the infrastructure packages that must be installed, the services that must be launched or stopped, the users and the methods for creating new users, as well as many other essential duties for provisioning an IT environment.
8. Bamboo
Version management and regular delivery are well supported by Bamboo, a well-known continuous delivery platform from Atlassian. Basically cross-platform, it is based on the Java programming language. Bamboo has the benefit of giving users (developers, administrators, testers, etc.) a shared workspace where they may collaborate on projects and exchange information that contains sensitive data. It effectively supports the integration of an automated build, test, and release workflow. Bamboo has been used for configuration management operations by businesses like Walmart, Target, Kaseya Limited, and Zendesk Inc. Almost all widely used languages and technologies have been found to be compatible with bamboo. It offers continuous delivery activities from the source code to the finished product that is delivered to the customer.
9. Docker
Docker is a relative newcomer that has taken the DevOps and software development worlds by storm since its 2013 launch. Docker's lightweight containerization technology is the secret to its success "Their method ensures that software programmes will function on any Linux server, regardless of setup and/or settings, by deploying software applications with all necessary components in a container. Created, customised, and saved as templates for usage on other hosts running the Docker engine, containers can be used. The same OS, configuration, and binaries can then be used to generate more containers using these templates."
10. Rudder
Rudder is an open-source solution for managing IT infrastructure. When completing configuration management tasks, Rudder's special asset-management feature, which can identify nodes and their attributes, can be helpful. Asset management is used by this CMT to determine which nodes need configuration management. Rudder is dependent on a small local agent that is deployed on each monitored system. The local agent of Rudder is developed in C, and the server-side web interface was created using Scala.
Configuration Management FAQs
System engineering and information technology both depend on the concept of configuration management. It is crucial for effectively managing the information interchange and procedures involved in creating goods and services, particularly those pertaining to software. Your IT responsibilities can be optimized, and your workplace systems can be made more effective, by having a solid understanding of configuration management.
Computer servers, software, and hardware are all kept in a desirable, consistent condition through the process of configuration management. It is a method of ensuring that a system operates as expected despite modifications made over time.
- Configuration Change Management.
- Configuration Status Accounting.
- Configuration Verification and Audit.
- Configuration Management Planning and Management.
- Configuration Identification.