Configuration Management

What is Configuration Management?

Configuration management is defined as a systems engineering process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance. It helps engineers to run and support large scale infrastructure and apps. So when you think of an enterprise or company running a SAAS software, you would have a lot of infrastructure and in order to manage and configure that infrastructure you use these configuration management tools.

Tools

I think Ansible (opens in a new tab) and Chef (opens in a new tab) are pretty popular tools and are used at many corporations/companies.

What is Ansible?

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

What is Chef?

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, Google Compute Engine and others.