Basic Principles of Configuration Management

Configuration Management aims to help engineering organizations manage the infrastructure, create reusable automation, and provide a strategy for managing change within. As such, Configuration Management purports to provide the following basic principles:

• Automate where automation is possible
• Provide traceability within the enterprise
• Provide developers, QA, operations, and management with a reproducible infrastructure that is managed through software-development best practices
• Develop a strategy for how new hardware will be provisioned and configured (in an automated way)
• Manage hardware configurations effectively and with strategy
• Develop mechanisms that provide a self-service model for deploying infrastructure changes
• Educate the organization on Configuration Management practices

Now that we have a basic understanding of the principles of Configuration Management, let's quickly delve into each of these principles and define them in a bit more depth...