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Software Engineering vocabulary · Release and Maintenance

Configuration management

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCommon term

In software engineering, configuration management means: Using tools to keep the software, settings and files on many servers in a known, consistent state, instead of changing each server by hand.

In Turkish: yapılandırma yönetimi, konfigürasyon yönetimi

How it is used

Ansible, Puppet, Chef and Salt are the classic tools. Terraform usually creates the servers, and a configuration management tool sets up what runs on them. Ansible files are called playbooks.

Example sentences

  1. With configuration management, patching 200 servers is one command instead of a week of work.

  2. We use Ansible for configuration management and Terraform for the cloud resources.

Common collocations

  • configuration management tool
  • Ansible playbook
  • configuration drift
  • manage configuration
  • infrastructure as codeManaging servers, networks and other cloud resources by writing configuration files that tools read and apply, instead of clicking through a console by hand.
  • TerraformA widely used infrastructure-as-code tool from HashiCorp. You describe resources in configuration files, and it creates, changes or deletes them to match.
  • YAMLA human-readable text format for configuration files that uses indentation and simple 'key: value' lines. Most DevOps tools are configured with it.
  • provisionTo create and set up computing resources, such as servers, databases or networks, so they are ready to use.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Release and Maintenance

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