Configuration Management Essentials

If you are reading this book, you are most likely looking for a consistent way to provision infrastructure, deploy code, and maintain the operational consistency of environments. These items all fit under Configuration Management, or CM for short. Configuration Management represents a cornerstone of DevOps and is something that Ansible manages very well. Configuration Management represents a way of development where automation can be used to provision and enforce the state, consistency, and accuracy of a set of systems. In a DevOps-oriented environment, Configuration Management will become increasingly critical for maintaining development environments, QA apparatuses and systems, production environments, and more. This is because the need to maintain such environments and keep a level of consistency among them is critical for deployment and operational success when it's time to release a software title or update.

In this chapter, we are going to learn all about Configuration Management. The chapter will cover and review how tools such as Ansible can make developers, testers, and operations personnel efforts easier by eliminating environment drift, automating the provisioning of infrastructure, and providing an easy and consistent way to spin up environments that match production. The goal of this chapter is to learn and understand automated Configuration Management techniques, and existentially these Configuration Management techniques could then be applied to provide value to small- or large-scale organizations. Within this chapter we are going to specifically address the following topics:

• Understanding Configuration Management
• Understanding the origins of Configuration Management
• The aims of Configuration Management
• Basic principles of Configuration Management
• Configuration Management best practices
• How Ansible simplifies DevOps implementations
• Binary Artifact Management and Ansible

Configuration Management is such an important topic (especially when it comes to solutions such as Ansible). Shall we get started?