BT

Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

Write for InfoQ

Topics

Choose your language

InfoQ Homepage Configuration Management Content on InfoQ

  • Infrastructure as a Code—Why Drift Management Is Not Enough

    The reality is that configuration drift will remain unavoidable for the foreseeable future. An EaaS solution, coupled with an IaC platform and good change management policies will help you prevent drift and shorten your development cycles.

  • How Difficult Can It Be to Integrate Software Development Tools? The Hard Truth

    Integrating tools used in software development and delivery is very hard. Getting endpoints to inter-operate is not a purely technical challenge, it’s more of a business problem. While there are a few choices in selecting the technical integration infrastructure (integration via APIs or at the database layer), the real challenges have more to do with friction caused by the dissimilarities.

  • Continuous Delivery Coding Patterns: Latent-to-Live Code & Forward Compatible Interim Versions

    This article describes two novel practices for continuous delivery: Latent-to-live code pattern and Forward compatible interim versions. You can use these practices to simultaneously increase speed and reliability of software development and reduce risks. These practices are built on top of two other essential continuous delivery practices: trunk-based-development and feature toggles.

  • How to Deal with COTS Products in a DevOps World

    Mirco Hering explains why we shouldn't leave COTS products (and the people working on them) left behind in a DevOps world. With creative solutions we can apply good practices from custom software. This leads to a significant effort reduction in the long term.

  • Writing Maintainable Configuration Code

    The article discusses a catalog of configuration smells containing 13 implementation configuration smells and 11 design configuration smells. It provides a few examples of configuration smells along with corresponding refactorings, explains their impact on the quality of the project, and lists a few tools that could be used to reveal such smells.

  • Configure Once, Run Everywhere: Decoupling Configuration and Runtime

    Configuration is one of the most widely used cross-cutting concerns in application development. Apache Tamaya is a new incubator project that brings standardized property management to Java.

  • Q&A with Matthias Marschall on Chef Infrastructure Automation Cookbook Update

    InfoQ asked Matthias Marshall what's new in the 2nd edition of his book and his view on the evolution of the configuration management tool space.

  • Version Control, Git, and your Enterprise

    This article is about understanding Git – both its benefits and limits – and deciding if it’s right for your enterprise. It is intended to highlight some of the key advantages and disadvantages typically experienced by enterprises and presents the key questions to be contemplated by your enterprise in determining whether Git is right for you and what you need to consider in moving to Git.

  • Config Management Camp Panel: Next Steps in Configuration Management

    Patrick Debois, part of the team that organized the first DevOps Days and who coined the term DevOps, ran the Config Management Camp panel "Next Steps in Configuration Management", featuring Luke Kanies, Puppet author and Puppet Labs CEO, John Keiser, development lead at Chef, Thomas Hatch, Salt author and Salt Stack founder, and Mark Phillips, director of business development at Ansible.

  • "The Docker Book" Review and Author Q&A

    "The Docker Book", by James Turnbull, is a hands-on book for everyone who wants to learn about Docker. It will take you from your first installation, through simple examples that explain Docker's concepts, to more complex scenarios that shed some light on how you would use Docker on the real world. InfoQ took the opportunity to hear the author on the book and Docker.

  • Book Review: "Taste Test, 2nd edition" and Q& A with Matt Jaynes

    Taste Test, by Matt Jaynes, is a book that uses a simple scenario to compare Ansible, SaltStack, Chef and Puppet. On the recently released 2nd edition it adds new chapters on Docker, the communities around the tools, and how they fare on security. InfoQ took this opportunity to talk with Matt to know more about his thoughts on the tools and his approach to configuration management when consulting.

  • Virtual Panel: Configuration Management Tools in the Real World

    Configuration management tools are a hot topic on the DevOps community and IT organizations in general. InfoQ reached out to users of each of the major tools (Ansible, CFEngine, Chef, Puppet and SaltStack) to ask them about their experiences. Why did they choose a given tool? How was the tool introduced in the organization? These are some of the questions they answered.

BT