I've come to appreciate **Configuration Management** as one of the most important, least [[Unsexy Solutions|sexy]] things I know about. It shows up in business, coding, and systems design contexts in general. If you have a [[What is a System|system]], you have a configuration to worry about. If you want your system to achieve it's desired purpose in an ongoing way, you need to manage that configuration. It's also hard to define, now that I think about it. "Configuration Management" is the intentional application of resources to ensure that things (generally speaking) remain in valid relationships with one another to achieve their individual purpose while adhering to the dependencies and constraints they impose on one-another. That's my bad definition. A better definition from Red Hat: > [!cite] Configuration management is a process for maintaining a desired state of IT systems and components. > per https://www.redhat.com/en/topics/automation/what-is-configuration-management In other words: - Systems are made up of components and context. - Components and context can both change over time. - As components and/or context change, you often have to change other things to in response or suffer consequences ## Mechanisms of Configuration Management - [[Git]] is a [[version control]] system, and version control is a subdomain of configuration management. - Utilizing a [[Broker]] to [[Modularity|modularize]] your system's components can help retain valid configurations over time (but also inserts the need for additional configuration controls) **** # More ## Source - Myself