By now, we are already familiar with the various aspects of the Docker ecosystem. The Docker host has several configuration parameters. However, manually configuring Docker hosts is a slow and error-prone process. We will have problems scaling our Docker deployments in production if we don't have an automation strategy in place.
In this chapter, we will learn the concept of configuration management to solve this problem. We will use Chef, a configuration management software, to manage Docker hosts in scale. This chapter will cover the following topics:
- Importance of configuration management
- Using Chef
- Provisioning Docker hosts
- Configuring Docker Swarm mode
- Alternative automation tools