Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
loped the following core ideas of this theory for automating IT when he was a professor at
Oslo University College in the late 1990s and early 2000s:
▪ Changes must be handled in a systematic fashion to ensure that a system is configured in
a correct and reliable manner.
▪ There must be some form of autonomy in the system so that it can automatically detect
faults and repair them without being explicitly told to do so.
Examples of modern IT configuration management tools are CFEngine, Puppet, the Desired
State Configuration engine in Microsoft Windows, Ansible, SaltStack, and of course, Chef.
Why You Need a Configuration Management Tool to
Automate IT
There are a number of reasons why automated configuration management tools play a vital
role in managing complex enterprise infrastructures. Here are four of the most popular reas-
ons:
▪
Consistency.
If your infrastructure is being configured manually, how do you know your
servers are being set up in a consistent manner? Further, how do you know these changes
are being performed in a way that meets your compliance and security requirements?
(For instance, are administrators logging changes in the appropriate systems?)
Make life easier for your system administrators by automating repeated tasks with a con-
figuration management tool. When repeated tasks are tedious, humans are alarmingly
bad at performing them consistently. Automate tedious administration tasks with a con-
figuration management tool so your staff can focus on other important things that hu-
mans do best.
▪
Efficient change management.
Whenever infrastructure is built manually without the
aid of a configuration management tool, people tend to fear change. Over time, servers
that are maintained by hand tend to become fragile environments that are hard to under-
stand and modify.
In these situations, organizations tend to develop a lot of processes for managing
changes, usually with the sole intent on minimizing change or even delaying it as long as
possible. This tends to delay introducing new features your customers need.
