Understanding Configuration Management

Unless you have been living in a bubble, you will probably have seen that Configuration Management automation has taken the IT world by storm. That is to say that hosts can now be automatically configured and provisioned to be in a specific state via code (Packages Installed, Users Created and so on). The idea that infrastructure can be defined and codified is not only novel but is now the norm. Configuration Management in many ways represents to infrastructure what software development represents to end-user software products. If it's unclear at this point what CM actually is, let's quickly define it:

Configuration Management is the detailed recording and updating of information that describes an enterprise's hardware and software. Such information typically includes the versions and updates that have been applied to installed software packages and the locations and network addresses of hardware devices.

Now that we have a basic idea of the textbook...