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DevOps Intermediate

What is Configuration Management?

The practice of systematically managing and maintaining consistent server configurations across infrastructure.

Configuration management ensures all servers in an environment are configured identically and consistently. Tools automate installing packages, managing files, setting up services, and applying security policies across hundreds of servers.

Popular tools include Ansible (agentless, YAML playbooks), Puppet (agent-based, declarative), Chef (agent-based, Ruby DSL), and Salt (fast, Python-based). These tools are idempotent — running the same configuration twice produces the same result.

Related Terms

Container Orchestration
The automated management of containerized applications including deployment, scaling, networking, and health monitoring across clusters.
Blue-Green Deployment
A deployment strategy using two identical environments where traffic is switched from the old version to the new one instantly.
Makefile
A file containing build rules and commands that automates compilation and common project tasks using the make utility.
Packer
A tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single configuration file.
SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)
An engineering discipline that applies software engineering principles to infrastructure and operations to create reliable systems.
Kubernetes Secret
A Kubernetes object for storing sensitive data like passwords, tokens, and certificates, with base64 encoding and optional encryption at rest.
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