The Aims of Configuration Management

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 is what Configuration Management is all about: saving time, saving money, saving resources, and minimizing waste. Yes, it takes a bit of work up front, but the result of such a solution is that machines can be commoditized, black magic won't be required to provision and deploy a given system, and people won't have to work twice as hard to achieve the same goal that a machine can already achieve. In addition to this value point, it also codifies team knowledge, whereas there may be one guy that knows how to setup apache (for example) and if he leaves then management of the solution could continue. As such, the aims of Configuration Management could be defined as follows:

• To track changes made to a given system or set of systems
• To provide traceability and auditability for defects that may arise as part of a set of changes made to a given system
• To help reduce the amount of manual effort made by developers, QA, and operations folks by maintaining a set of automated solutions that can aid in the provisioning and configuration of a given system
• To provide a level of repeatability to the organization by clearly defining (in automation form) the steps required to build out a given system

In the previous simple example, we saw how Configuration Management can save both time and money. But now that we know the basic benefits of Configuration Management and how it's used, let's take a look at a few more examples of CM and how it could potentially benefit an organization.