Configuration management
Configuration management is enforcing the desired configuration in a network of computer letting software do the hard work.
Configuration management becomes very useful when you have to manage more than 3-4 similar computers, since the job of having a correct and expected configuration is both not easy and boring, so it's easy to introduce errors while doing repetitive work.
The main tools used to achieve this goal today are a few:
All these tools serve the purpose of configuration management, but I'm in the process of finding which one does bettere the
job.
you can find a quite fair comparison of CFengine and Puppet.
I will highlight some of the differences that can help you make the choice:
| CFengine | Bcfg2 | Puppet | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Language | C |
Python |
Ruby |
| Strenghts |
Efficient, very flexible, broadly adopted |
XML configuration |
High level of abstraction, good level of adoption, many develoopers |
| Weaknesses | Documentation is in "academic language" |
Abstraction cuts away some flexibility, heavy resource usage (RAM, time to execute) |