Configuration Management
What is configuration management? Well, you got it right! It is managing configurations! Hmmmm…. That sounds like I just switched the two words around….
Firstly, let me explain to you what kind of configuration we are talking about when we say “configuration management”. It is setting up OS/server, installing necessary softwares/dependencies that would allow our application/software to run smoothly, without failure.
Now, putting those words together; configuration management, it is basically configuring hundreds if not thousands of servers and managing your configurations/settings on those servers without you needing to go into each and every server and configure it to meet your needs. Not only that, lets say you have 50 database servers and 50 web servers. Database servers may have some configurations that are same as the configurations needed in web servers, but their configurations also differ. At this point, you can create a group, let’s call it datacenter, in which you have grouped all the web servers and database servers, and you can also create a group named dbservers which will contain all the database servers, than a separate group for all the web servers.
Grouping your servers like this will enable you to configure these servers the way you like it. Let us say, for example, you want to install python on both the servers, you would just select datacenter and install python. Now, let us say you want to install MySQL database on all the database servers, than you will just need to select the dbserver group which will let you install MySQL database on all the servers!
TOOLS:
You might be wondering,
how can I achieve that?!
There are many tools that will help you achieve that incredible result, and even more, one of them is Ansible. How to use it? It’s a story for another time. For now, GOODBYE WORLD!
