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:
Infrastructure as Code is the process of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure (processes, bare-metal servers, virtual servers, and so on) and their configuration through machine-processable...
