What Is Configuration

Monitoring the progress and settlement of all change requests are also included. One must be able to provide information on the project’s assets, often in terms of what is ready and where it is located, as well as on its finances, including expense, budgeting, depreciation, etc. It makes troubleshooting a lot easier when you have just one file governing a system. Now, when you move to a different, system, all it takes is migrating a copy of your config files to replicate your settings. Configuration formats help developers store the data their applications need and help users store preferences for how they want applications to act.

Recently, a major systems provider released an embedded software update that “bricked” half the devices in their product line. The cost of this mistake was monumental, not only in the time and effort required to quickly release a patch to fix this issue and the cost of lost productivity, but the company’s market cap was hit severely as a result of this mistake. Successful configuration management aims to identify all code, easily retrieve all configuration items, good configuration audit, desired state, accumulation of change requests without any regression, and more. In the future, the CM will include tools like Kubernetes, Docker, Habitat, etc. Utilizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for configuration management, Otter was developed exclusively for Windows. Otter enables users to simulate the config, monitor for drift, schedule updates, and verify consistency to automate configuration management.

Puppet Enterprise

Once you understand and codify the components that make up the computer systems in your organization, configuration management can help you establish and maintain that desired state across environments. Configuration management ensures a system performs as desired over time, even as changes are made to the system. Organizations often use configuration management to reduce configuration drift and maintain compliance with IT security standards. Examples of a configuration management system include version control systems as well as specialized configuration management platforms like Puppet, Ansible, and Chef. For an example of how we’ve applied these principles in practice, see the ACM Queue article on Canary Analysis Service. When designing this practical internal system, we spent about a month trying to reduce mandatory questions and finding good answers for optional questions.

Configuration philosophy pertains to aspects of configuration that are completely independent of the chosen language and other mechanics. Our discussion of philosophy encompasses how to structure the configuration, how to achieve the correct level of abstraction, and how to support diverging use cases seamlessly. This chapter examines configuration from the perspective of someone who designs and maintains an infrastructure system. It describes our experiences and strategies for designing configuration in a safe and sustainable way. Auditing and accounting help to ensure that any changes that are applied to the configuration are reviewed by stakeholders and accepted, ensuring accountability and visibility into configuration changes. The system’s structured record keeping ensures time savings for IT departments and minimizes the number of funds that may be lost by the business since the expenditure is reduced on addressing frequent or unnecessary problems.

Understanding the objectives of configuration management

Uniformity is key when configuring company-owned devices for use by employees to get their jobs done. Company-issued laptops, workstations, tablets and cell phones likely all fall into a similar protocol for operating systems, applications, permissions and other necessary settings. The Puppet Forge has more than 7,000 ready-to-use modules to help install software, maintain websites, run databases, manage operating system parameters, and thousands of other configuration management tasks. In short, configuration management ensures that misconfigurations don’t go unnoticed and prevents them from creating problems across the environment.

This is one reason an on-premises server is usually located in the core of the network. Although it can be accessed from the internet, remote access requires a VPN connection. Testing will be imperative when creating a config file and changing its functionality. The testing and launch should be treated as critical in order to reach the desired result and function. Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform helps your organization accelerate, orchestrate, and innovate with automation.

Network configuration management

The system infrastructure should operate on plain static data, which can be in formats like Protocol Buffers, YAML, or JSON. This choice does not imply that the user needs to actually interact with pure data. This data format can, however, be used by APIs that configuration allow further stacking of systems and automation. When we deploy software systems, we do not think of them as fixed and never-changing. Ever-evolving business needs, infrastructure requirements, and other factors mean that systems are constantly in flux.

Automated configuration management lets organizations move quickly and consistently over time while promoting better security and reducing risk for the business. A configuration management system enables visibility, reporting, auditability, and enforcement of configurations across a system. The basic functions of a configuration management system include version control, change management, configuration control, auditing, release management, and more. To answer the age-old question of whether configuration is code or data, our experience has shown that having both code and data, but separating the two, is optimal.

• Sidestep the debate on whether or not to use JSON as a configuration format and just learn how to parse it using Groovy.
• Frequent reconfiguration and realignment of applications, software services, and IT infrastructure are necessary to keep the entire technical landscape functional.
• Salt is a configuration and execution management application designed to handle hundreds of thousands of systems and IT assets.
• Consider the complex array of operator controls in the NASA spacecraft control center in Figure 14-1.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word ‘configuration.’ Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Blockchain is a record-keeping technology designed to make it impossible to hack the system or forge the data stored on it, thereby making it secure and immutable. Generally, a configuration is the arrangement – or the process of making the arrangement – of the parts that make up a whole.

Organizations that need sovereign operations can benefit from on-premises network management servers, since all the data is stored onsite. They act as a central interface for Linux, as well as Kubernetes and other systems. They can be managed with a variety of different tools, whether you want to edit, change, or even create a config file from scratch. To be broadly effective, the most important thing about configuration files is that they are consistent and predictable.