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 can be traced back in origins to the early 1950s, an era of punch cards and large mainframe computing apparatuses. Punch cards at the time often needed to be organized and delivered to the mainframe, and as a result of this specific ordering, a requirement was mandated by larger organizations to manage the configuration of such punch cards. After the golden days of punch cards, additional management requirements came to light with regard to maintaining the state of a given software system or IT apparatus. Entities capable of managing such a process at the time were limited to the government's CDC Update and IBM's IBM IEBUPDATE, respectively.

It wasn't until the early to mid 1990s that software Configuration Management (CM for short) began to be taken notice of in mid- to large-scale organizations. Companies...

Configuration Management's goal is to facilitate the lives of developers, quality assurance personnel, management, and operational personnel by providing them with the tools and automation necessary to track and implement additional changes and configurations for a target system. The general logic flow of Configuration Management goes something like this:

On a very basic level, this...

Configuration Management aims to help engineering organizations manage the infrastructure, create reusable automation, and provide a strategy for managing change within. As such, Configuration Management purports to provide the following basic principles:

• Automate where automation is possible
• Provide traceability within the enterprise
• Provide developers, QA, operations, and management with a reproducible infrastructure that is managed through software-development best practices
• Develop a strategy for how new hardware will be provisioned and configured (in an automated way)
• Manage hardware configurations effectively and with strategy
• Develop mechanisms that provide a self-service model for deploying infrastructure changes
• Educate the organization on Configuration Management practices

Now that we have a basic understanding of the principles...

Now that we have a basic understanding of Configuration Management's overarching purpose and how it can be leveraged in an enterprise, let's take a look at some best practices involved in Configuration Management. Configuration Management in the modern software enterprise comes in many forms. Some of the more popular tools for Configuration Management are listed as follows:

• Ansible
• Chef
• Puppet
• CFEngine

Solutions such as these are mostly open source options that provide ways to keep and maintain infrastructure in code form, or IaC (Infrastructure as Code). For those unfamiliar with IaC, here is a general definition from Wikipedia: