Introduction to config management

Let's look at the traditional way of hosting and managing applications. We first create a virtual machine from physical infrastructure and then log in manually to virtual machines. We can then choose to either run a set of scripts or do the setup manually. At least that's what we are doing till now, even in this book.

There are a number of problems with this approach. Let's look at some of them:

• If we set up the server manually, the process is not repeatable. For example, if we need to build another server with a similar configuration, we will have to repeat the entire process.
• Even if we use scripts, the scripts themselves are not idempotent. This means they cannot identify the delta configuration and apply them only if it is needed.
• Typical production environments consist of a huge number of servers, and therefore setting everything up manually is a labor-intensive task and adds to the toil. Software engineers should...