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  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • CFEngine's Decentralized Approach to Configuration Management

    Mark Burgess and Diego Zamboni introduce CFEngine. They describe the challenges regarding web scale - scale, complexity and knowledge - and how CFEngine helps to tackle those challenges with a fundamentally decentralized and knowledge-oriented approach. An example demonstrates how those ideas translate into practice.

  • Purely Functional Configuration Management with Nix and NixOS

    This article gives a short introduction to NixOS, a Linux distribution, and to Nix, the package manager on which NixOS is based. These provide a declarative approach to configuration management with many advantages to users, such as strong reproducibility and atomic upgrades and rollbacks.

  • Ansible’s View on IT Automation

    Michael DeHaan, creator of Ansible, introduces the general-purpose IT automation system. He describes the tool’s guiding principles: simplicity, ease of use and maximum security. The philosophy behind its community is also discussed, including the importance of Ansible’s plugin-based model. Michael uses a simple but common scenario to demonstrate Ansible.

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