What does configuration management mean

Habitat provides a uniform approach to building and deploying your application, with a final package that can run on bare metal servers, or be exported to Docker and Kubernetes. This provides a consistent workflow that works for running your application on any platform. Kustomize helps you customize the configuration of your deployed applications, and makes it easier to use third party applications in your Kubernetes deployment.

With the introduction of new assets in the internet-of-things, organizations will likely have way more assets to manage, which will likely introduce new tools. What seems clear, however, is that containerization platforms and their associated configuration management tools will continue to grab market share from virtual machine based deployments due to their numerous advantages. UpGuard can protect your business from data breaches , identify all of your data leaks , and help you continuously monitor the security posture of all your vendors.

UpGuard also supports compliance across a myriad of security frameworks, including the new requirements set by Biden's Cybersecurity Executive Order. Dec UpGuard BreachSight Monitor your business for data breaches and protect your customers' trust.

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Blog The latest issues in cybersecurity. Breaches Data breach research and global news. News In-depth reporting on data breaches and news. Events Expand your network with UpGuard Summit. Newsletter Get the latest curated cybersecurity updates. Even if you don't, every company uses technology to automate their processes. Open the settings menu in any software and you are dealing with configuration management.

Other benefits of configuration management include: Reduced risk of outages and security breaches through visibility and tracking of the changes to your systems. Cost reduction by having detailed knowledge of all the elements of your configuration, avoiding wasteful duplication of your technology assets. Improved experience for your customers and internal staff by rapidly detecting and correcting improper configurations that could negatively impact performance.

Strict control of your processes by defining and enforcing formal policies and procedures that govern asset identification, status monitoring, and auditing. Greater agility and faster problem resolution, enabling you to provide a higher quality of service and reduce software engineering costs. Efficient change management by knowing your baseline configuration, and having the visibility to design changes that avoid problems.

Quicker restoration of service. In an outage, you'll be able to recover quickly as your configuration is documented and automated. Better release management and clear status accounting. Reviewed by. Kaushik Sen Chief Marketing Officer. Free eBook. Learn about how to manage configuration drift with this in-depth eBook. Download eBook. User management Certification Central. Register now Not registered yet? Here are a few reasons why you should be: Browse Knowledgebase articles, manage support cases and subscriptions, download updates, and more from one place.

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Proper configuration management tools: Classify and manage systems by groups and subgroups. Centrally modify base configurations. Roll out new settings to all applicable systems. Automate system identification, patches, and updates Identify outdated, poor performing, and noncompliant configurations. Prioritize actions.

Access and apply prescriptive remediation. This e-book covers 4 other life-cycle management factors. Automating configuration management The role of configuration management is to maintain systems in a desired state. Get the guide to automating your IT operations. Learn the basics of Ansible for automation.

Explore automation with Red Hat. Featured resources E-book: 5 steps to automate your business E-book: The automated enterprise. Rather, we want to know the answers to questions like. That hopefully paints a clearer picture of the problems that configuration management is trying to solve. Agile software, by definition, reflects the desire to make changes to our software faster so that we can respond to market demands. Configuration management helps us to safely manage our changes and keep velocity high.

DevOps is the extension of agile practices across both the development and operations departments. In fact, DevOps seeks to unify the goals of both departments. At some companies, the development department seeks change while the operations department seeks stability. But companies that embrace DevOps want both stability of their deployed assets and frequency of change.

However, achieving this outcome requires cultural change. Like agile, configuration management gives teams the confidence to move quickly with their changes. Under agile practices, the company gives configuration management responsibilities to the development teams, empowering them to provision, configure, and manage their own infrastructure.

You build it, you run it. Pipelines usually involve steps such as linting code, unit testing code, integration testing code, and creating artifacts. A software pipeline therefore is a form of configuration management. When we build software with tools like Docker, we codify our build instructions into our Dockerfile.

This allows us to better understand the dependencies of our artifacts. Infrastructure-as-code or IaC for short is the practice of ensuring all provisioned infrastructure is done so through code. The purpose of IaC is to have a written record of which services exist, where they are located, and under what circumstance.

Configuration management might choose to leverage aspects of IaC in order to achieve the full understanding of all the technology assets a company owns.

Continuous delivery is the process of ensuring that software is always in a releasable state. You can achieve this through heavy automation and testing. Continuous integration is the process of bringing separate software artifacts together into a single location on a frequent basis, for the purposes of verifying that the code integrates properly.

Continuous integration tools, which are typically servers that run automation-testing suites, act as a form of configuration management by providing visibility into the steps required to set up and configure a given software artifact.

That should clear up some of your lingering questions about how configuration management fits with some practices or ideas that you might be using or are familiar with. Any discussion of configuration management would be incomplete, however, without a discussion about tooling. But before we get to that, I need to quickly discuss a concept to consider when comparing tools.

And the concept is declarative style. When it comes to software, having a declarative style means telling your software the end result you want and then letting the software do the work in figuring out the way to get there. The opposite of the declarative style would be a procedural style, where instead of giving an end state, you give instructions on how to get there.

You can think of it like this: declarative versus procedural is the difference between giving a friend your home address and giving them step-by-step instructions to get to your house from where they are. But why is it important? Declarative style is important because configuration management is all about knowing the current state of your applications.

There are many different tools for configuration management.