Configuration Management

Managing the infrastructure for an application often means performing repetitive or easily automate-able tasks on the environments over time. Additionally, often times administrators need to do the same task or series of tasks manually for multiple servers.

Configuration Management is the process of using automation and automated tasks to manage infrastructure more easily. To accomplish this, there are a few popular options for tools to use:

• Ansible
• Jenkins
• Chef
• Puppet

Repetitive Tasks

These types of tasks can be things like:

• Updating the installed software to a specific version
• Managing user/group permissions on a physical or virtual server
• Starting/stopping individual services
• Creating backups
• Rebooting

How management tooling works

Depending on the tool you use, typically you do one of the following tasks:

• Configure your set of servers / resources using a language like YAML
• Configure one or more tasks using either a template language like YAML or using a programming language that the target server has installed like Bash, PowerShell, Python, or Ruby
• Using the tool, use the appropriate GUI or CLI button/command to run the tasks

Agentless vs Agents

When choosing a tool and getting started, it's important to note if the tool requires using an Agent.

To execute tasks on the machine, you can run them using a long-running or short-lived process on the machine known as an Agent, or you can execute them remotely over SSH which is known as Agentless (since SSH-executed tasks do not require an agent to run)