DevOps has emerged as a powerful continuous integration and development tool which is being used by a variety of IT based organizations, making the very delivery of the applications and software agile and efficient at all times. With the help of configuration management, things can now be taken on next level like never before. DevOps feed on the idea of automation and scaling the businesses entirely according to the current requirements within the market. If you don’t have a clear idea about what configuration management is, then here is a brief overview for you;
What is configuration management?
Configuration management is the concept of actively and consistently managing or configuration the systems according to your own diverse requirements. It means that you can write code in a repeated and reliable fashion so that you can mold the systems in any way you see fit. Before the presence of the dedicated configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef and many others, scripts and codes written in specified instructions were widely used to direct any changes within the configuration of the applications and systems coordinating under the brand name of DevOps. Configuration management in DevOps is extremely important especially when it comes to analyzing current scenario of the DevOps extensive processes and what can be done to turn things around.
The newly developed configuration management systems have made it even more easy to configure various systems at once even if we are talking about configuration management at scale of large numbers. This approach would best help the professionals who are dealing with a large number of the server systems that are being run in different possible environments of the DevOps landscape.
This way not only the development, operations, configuration, testing and management of all the resources can be directed and configured with the help of configuration management but also dedicated standards could be built. This way both the small and large enterprises can best implement their own configurations around a wide array of configurations.
Why use the configuration management?
Configuration managenmt can help you with easier and faster deployment of the systems, applications and software. All your effects would then be faster, scalable, repeatable, predictable and could be implemented on a large scale say on thousands of servers or even far across this number. All the controlled assets then would fall under the control of the differentiated settings you have in mind for these such as applying a set of different configuration management for the development as well as the operations team.
Following advantages can come from using the configuration management;
- Navigation of code can become much easier and you also won’t have any hard time deploying different code settings to different DevOps environment.
- It would also make sure that no matter how many times the initial state of the code is changed or altered, it would still remain the same in its doing or processing at the end
- The dedicated distribution design would help to improve the management of the code across such large numbers of the remote servers
- You would have manual access to all the processes that are being run in an automated fashion and this is where things get a little interested. Because you will have the total control over things and won’t have to worry about the current state of a service or process as it can still be changed to your requirements almost instantly.
In cases of a few configuration management software or tools systems, there is even an update or a controlled fashion in which all the new and latest features could be extracted from a central repository. This would help your DevOps ambitions to stay secure and fresh at all times. Then, following this same distributed design the updates could then be pushed across all dedicated server systems or even to the managed servers.
Top configuration management tools that you must consider today
There are many tools that are available in the digital world which would serve as the best configuration managers. A brief notion of tools that could be the best fit for you are described as follows;
- Jenkins
Jenkins in reality is a CI (continuous integration) developed with the help of java. It offers the users to integrate and configure both the development interface and the console commands. Jenkins is by far the most dedicated and effective tool that is brought into use by an extensive number of developers and integration experts around the world.
The main reason for this approach or popularity is the use of extensions and other dedicated plugins which are not only easy to install but also can perform a lot of duties in a simultaneous fashion. Another astounding quality of Jenkins is that it can help in the testing of the developed systems, tools and software over various separate builds.
- Puppet Vs Chef
While both are the configuration managers used by professionals in a DevOps settings, these have slight differences with each other. Such as puppet is often required by the professionals that have some experience with the system administration but for some people chef is a priority because of the fact that these people are developers. Servers and agents are required to be installed and interpreted when we take into account the installation of the puppet configurations other than the chef systems. While both almost serve the same purpose, their requirements often vary depending on the type of the configuration management style needed and of course on the preference of the organization.
Configuration management can actually help you get ahead in the game of managing your secured assets and configuration the development and operations side of things as you require. Apart from all this it would also help you to stay up to date with the latest security related concerns and what needs to be done if some sort of modification or reconfiguration is required. Several types of configuration management oriented training is present for you over the online channels but you should only go for best online DevOps training so that you can help your organization build a satisfactory and up to date environment focused on configuration management.