The digital world is full of jargon that makes it difficult for businesses to track them. As a result, they feel confused and overwhelmed. If you are a start-up owner and looking for how configuration management services benefit your business, we have got your back. In this post, you will get to know everything about configuration management.
In a nutshell, it helps you lay the foundation for successful software. Do you want your tech platform to be relevant in the digital space? Then hire a developer with years of experience. Below, we will cover why it is necessary for your business. Let us get to the basics first.
What is configuration management?
Configuration management (CM) can be referred to as a practice, discipline, or procedure. It helps developers manage the configurable components of a software application. The primary purpose of this process is to offer a stable environment. Also, it ensures the easy tracking of application components, both hardware and software. In the end, your application will run better and faster. With CM services, your assets will stay up-to-date.
If you want to understand better, here are the key principles of configuration management.
- Knowing and labeling configurable items – The process first knows the available configurable items. These can be anything like servers, networks, and computer resources. After this, it helps you label or number each item.
- Ensuring protection – Another crucial principle is to protect the configuration items. It allows you to monitor them round-the-clock and prevent cyber-attacks.
- Maintaining a stable baseline – When it comes to a stable baseline, it refers to the environment where configurable things exist. One of the functions of CM is to set up a stable or standard environment.
- Auditing – IT automation also plays a vital role in verifying configuration items regularly. With this, you will know they are stable and working right.
Now, you have a basic understanding. It is time to discover how configuration management services benefit your business.
What are the benefits of hiring configuration management services?
Well-implemented configuration management can benefit your application in various ways. Here are the top advantages.
1. Disaster management
Software applications are susceptible to crashes and other mishaps. If such things happen to you, configuration management can help you deal with the disaster. Therefore, you can recover your assets with ease. Besides this, configuration management services ensure hassle-free rollbacks. In simple words, whenever you implement poor code, you can return to the software state before the change.
2. Site Reliability
Site reliability refers to the frequency at which your service is up. In short, an application is reliable with minimum downtimes. Do you know even one-second downtime can cost you a big time, like thousands? In the digital world, every second counts because of cut-throat competition.
But what causes frequent downtime? The answer is simple – bad deployments. That results in because of differences between production servers and test servers. Fortunately, you can fix this problem with configuration management services. These make sure test environments mimic production. As a result, there are fewer chances of downtime.
3. Ease of scaling
What do you understand by scaling? It is the process of including more resources in an existing application. The purpose is to improve its performance and functionality. Plus, by using IT automation services, you can get a good idea about your service. Depending on this, you can increase the number of servers running on your application. And when it comes to scaling, it is as easy as clicking a button.
These are some of the many benefits that come with IT automation. In addition, it offers numerous perks to DevOps developers. Do you know configuration management comes complementary with DevOps models? Its visibility helps developers to optimize their applications to ensure they perform within the set parameters. Or else, they will face challenges during the execution and operations of the DevOps lifecycle. As a result, the poor performance will render complete outages. The following are some ways configuration management services help DevOps developers.
- It ensures faster onboarding of new members of the team.
- Developers can use it to collaborate between teams effortlessly.
- Lastly, it offers an extended lifecycle of software for assets and products.
The bottom line
It is a simple practice that helps enterprises track the current state of their software and applications. To be precise, it offers proper documentation and traceability of running software. Therefore, you will know about the services that run and their current state. If you do not wish to stay in the dark after setting up the software, hire configuration management services.
If you like to know more about IT automation and associated tools, visit our blog. At SoftProdigy, we have experts who can offer you valuable information on this domain and topics like configuration management in Azure DevOps.
FAQs
1. What is configuration management?
It refers to a process that helps businesses maintain their software and servers in the desired state. Also, it ensures the performance of systems is consistent.
2. Which are the primary tools used in configuration management?
There are numerous tools we use in such management proceesses for various purposes such as configuration, provisioning, source control, etc. If we name some, of these are Chef, Puppet, CloudFormation, Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, etc.
Divya Chakraborty is the COO and Director at SoftProdigy, driving digital transformation with AI and Agile. She partners with AWS and Azure, empowers teams, and champions innovation for business growth.