Goals of a software configuration management process

Version control and configuration management solve this problem by adding visibility to configuration modifications. When a change is made to configuration data, the version control system tracks it, which allows team members to review an audit trail of modifications.

Version control applied to the configuration can be rapidly reverted to a last known stable state. Configuration data has historically been hard to wrangle and can easily become an afterthought. Traditional and small scale system administration is usually done with a collection of scripts and ad-hoc processes. Configuration data can be overlooked at times, but it is critical to system operation. The rise of cloud infrastructures has led to the development and adoption of new patterns of infrastructure management.

Complex, cloud-based system architectures are managed and deployed through the use of configuration data files. These new cloud platforms allow teams to specify the hardware resources and network connections they need provisioned through human and machine readable data files like YAML.

The data files are then read and the infrastructure is provisioned in the cloud. This pattern is called infrastructure as code IaC. In the early years of internet application development, hardware resources and systems administration were primarily performed manually. System administrators wrangled configuration data while manually provisioning and managing hardware resources based on configuration data.

Configuration management is a key part of a DevOps lifecycle. DevOps configuration is the evolution and automation of the systems administration role, bringing automation to infrastructure management and deployment.

DevOps configuration also brings system administration responsibility under the umbrella of software engineering. Enterprises today utilize it to empower software engineers to request and provision needed resources on demand. This removes a potential organizational dependency bottleneck of a software development team waiting for resources from a separate system administration team. This same flow can be applied to configuration changes.

A perfect example of this process is a GitOps workflow. Configuration management enables agile teams to clearly triage and prioritize configuration work. Examples of configuration work are chores and tasks like:. Once a configuration management platform is in place, teams have visibility into the work required for configuration tasks.

Configuration management work can be identified as dependencies for other work and properly addressed as part of agile sprints. Git is the industry-leading version control system to track code changes. Adding configuration management data alongside code in a Git repository provides a holistic version control view of an entire project. Git is a foundational tool in higher-level configuration management. The following list of other configuration management tools is designed to be stored in a Git repository and leverage Git version control tracking.

Docker introduced containerization that is an advanced form of configuration management -- like a configuration lockdown. Docker is based on configuration files called Dockerfiles, which contain a list of commands that are evaluated to reconstruct the expected snapshot of operating system state.

Docker creates containers from these Dockerfiles that are snapshots of a preconfigured application. Dockerfiles are committed to a Git repository for version tracking and need additional configuration management to deploy them to infrastructure. Terraform is an open source configuration management platform by HasiCorp. Terraform uses IaC to provision and manage clusters, cloud infrastructure, or services.

Each cloud platform has its own representation and interface for common infrastructure components like servers, databases, and queues.

Terraform built an abstraction layer of configuration tools for cloud platforms that enable teams to write files that are reproducible definitions of their infrastructure.

These frameworks automate many traditional system administrators' processes. The configuration data files specify a sequence of actions to take to configure a system.

When you enter a group of words, OR is inferred. You can use Boolean operators to refine your search. Results returned are case insensitive. However, results ranking takes case into account and assigns higher scores to case matches.

Therefore, a search for "cats" followed by a search for "Cats" would return the same number of Help topics, but the order in which the topics are listed would be different. Without the quotation marks, the query is equivalent to specifying an OR operator, which finds topics with one of the individual words instead of the phrase. The Configuration Management process ensures that selected components of a complete IT service, system, or product the Configuration Item are identified, baselined, and maintained and that changes to them are controlled.

It provides a Configuration model of the services, assets, and infrastructure by recording the relationships between service assets and Configuration Items. It also ensures that releases into controlled environments and operational use are completed on the basis of formal approvals.

It provides a configuration model of the services, assets, and infrastructure by recording the relationships between service assets and Configuration Items CIs. Configuration Management may cover non-IT assets, work products used to develop the services, and Configuration Items required to support the services that are not formally classified as assets. Any component that requires management to deliver an IT Service is considered part of the scope of Configuration Management. The asset management portion of this process manages service assets across the whole service life cycle, from acquisition to disposal.

It also provides a complete inventory of assets and the associated owners responsible for their control. The Configuration Management portion of this process maintains information about any CI required to deliver an IT service, including its relationships.

This information is managed throughout the life cycle of the CI. Reduced User Downtime : A great advantage of using a standard configuration is that systems become completely interchangeable resulting in reduced user downtime.

On experiencing an unrecoverable error, an identical new system can be dropped into place. User data can be transferred if the non-functional machine is still accessible, or the most recent copy can be pulled off of the backup tape with the ultimate goal being that the user experiences little change in the system interface.

Software installed. Reliable Data Backups : Using standard directory for user data allows backup system to selectively backup a small portion of a machine, greatly reducing the network traffic and tape usage for backup systems. A divided directory structure, between system and user data, is one of the main goals of the configuration standards. Easy workstation setup : The standardized configuration of any sort will streamline the process of setting up the system and insures that vital components are available.

If multiple machines are being setup according to a standard set-up, most of the setup configurations can be automated. Multi-user Support : It is not common to share the workstation for the users.

So that system configuration is designed in such a way to use the same workstation without interfering with each other networks. Some software packages do not support completely independent settings for all users, however, users can have independent data users. Usage of structure will not impose limits on the number of independent users a system can have. Remote Software Installation : Mostly the modern software packages are the pre-defined directories installed in factory.