What is a configuration management tool?

What is a configuration management tool?

Configuration management tools make changes and deployments faster, remove the potential for human error, while making system management predictable and scalable. They also help you to keep track of the state of your resources, and keep you from repeating tasks, like installing the same package twice.

What is the purpose of cloud configuration management tools?

Cloud configuration management tools enable you to manage your infrastructure deployments through the design, implementation, testing, building, release, and maintenance phases.

What is configuration management and why is it important?

Why is configuration management important? Configuration management helps engineering teams build robust and stable systems through the use of tools that automatically manage and monitor updates to configuration data. Complex software systems are composed of components that differ in granularity of size and complexity.

What is immutable infrastructure?

Immutable infrastructure refers to servers (or VMs) that are never modified after deployment. With an immutable infrastructure paradigm, servers work differently. We no longer want to update in-place servers. Instead, we want to ensure that a deployed server will remain intact, with no changes made.

What are container orchestration tools?

Container orchestration is the automation of much of the operational effort required to run containerized workloads and services. This includes a wide range of things software teams need to manage a container’s lifecycle, including provisioning, deployment, scaling (up and down), networking, load balancing and more.

What are the benefits of Configuration Management?

Benefits of Configuration Management

• Increased efficiency with a defined configuration process that provides control and improves visibility with tracking.
• Cost reduction by having detailed knowledge of all the elements of the configuration which allows for unnecessary duplication to be avoided.

What is the goal of Configuration Management?

The purpose of Configuration Management is to identify, record, control, report, audit and verify service assets and configuration items, including baselines, versions, constituent components, their attributes, and relationships.

What is the difference between mutable and immutable infrastructure?

Choosing mutable infrastructure often comes with the risk of snowflake servers. These are servers that have a unique configuration, and therefore, require manual administration. Immutable infrastructure supports automatic deployment. This type of infrastructure is primarily built around virtualization.

Are containers immutable?

Container Security and Immutability Docker containers are in fact immutable. This means that a running container never changes because in case you need to update it, the best practice is to create a new container with the updated version of your application and delete the old one.

Is VSS a SCM tool?

Overview. SourceSafe was initially not a client/server Source Code Management, but rather a local only SCM system. Instead, files must be accessed through the VSS client tools – the VSS windows client, the VSS command-line tool, or some application that integrates with or emulates these client tools.

How are configuration changes implemented in immutable infrastructure?

All configuration changes in an immutable infrastructure are implemented by checking an updated image into version control with documentation and using an automated, unified deployment process to deploy replacement servers with that image. Shell access to the servers is sometimes completely restricted.

How are servers updated in a mutable infrastructure?

In a traditional mutable server infrastructure, servers are continually updated and modified in place. Engineers and administrators working with this kind of infrastructure can SSH into their servers, upgrade or downgrade packages manually, tweak configuration files on a server-by-server basis, and deploy new code directly onto existing servers.

What is the purpose of immutable server pattern?

The immutable server pattern is just the transposition for cloud operations of the above mantra, according to which we should avoid manual maintenance of running programs. Instead of manually configuring severs, the immutable server pattern recommends to automatise this configuration.

Why are immutable infrastructures used in cloud computing?

In contrast, immutable infrastructures were designed from the start to rely on virtualization-based technologies for fast provisioning of architecture components, like cloud computing’s virtual servers. The fundamental conceptual change that cloud computing advanced was that servers could be considered disposable.