Often bundled into one device that does it all, the company’s network of printers must accommodate the departments as appropriate for the job requirements. Different permissions and settings can be pre-configured according to each staff level or personnel tier to limit unnecessary printing and resource usage. Application configuration is the act of defining and enforcing a state in web applications, database applications, or containerized platforms. Validating that the configuration is semantically meaningful, to the maximum extent possible, can help prevent outages and decrease operational costs. For every possible misconfiguration, we should ask ourselves if we could prevent it at the moment the user commits the configuration, rather than after changes are submitted. Tooling can make the difference between a chaotic nightmare and a sustainable and scalable system, but it is often overlooked when configuration systems are designed.
Accelerate and ensure the success of your generative AI initiatives with multi-cloud flexibility, choice, privacy and control. Container orchestration automates the deployment, management, scaling, and networking of containers. Linux containers and virtual machines (VMs) are packaged computing environments that combine various IT components and isolate them from the rest of the system. Sidestep the debate on whether or not to use JSON as a configuration format and just learn how to parse it using Groovy. If you must use a binary format for configuration, use one that already exists as an open standard, such as NetCDF. XML is often used by Java programmers, and Java has a rich set of XML parsers.
Parsing config files with Lua
Configuration status accounting monitors each version issued throughout the process, evaluating what’s new in each version and why modifications were required. You should be able to determine if an object is Active, Completed, In Process, Checked Out (and by whom), or any other status you assign. Adding or editing configuration items or changing user configuration rights are the most frequent requests. In addition, configuration records must be strictly governed to provide a complete audit trail between the initial demand and the final version. On-premises systems are usually larger servers that have enough power to process the data so that it can be used to provide the insights IT needs to manage the network.
While it has a reputation of being quite strict, XML is simultaneously very flexible. Unlike HTML, which has a set of tags you’re allowed to use, you can arbitrarily invent your own XML tags. As long as you structure it consistently and have a good library to parse it, you can extract your data with precision and ease.
Other words from configuration
Once the two are compared and reporting shows compliance being enforced across the infrastructure, the audit becomes a breeze. Baseline configuration management is a common use case for automated configuration management because it drives out these inconsistencies and reduces risk easily. With baseline configuration management of the operating system(s), provisioning and change can be secured across the fleet of infrastructure – whether it resides on premises, in the cloud, or both.
As a result, regardless of where the business needs to head, it can rely on automated configuration management to move quickly, be agile, and maintain consistent configurations. Hardware teams and software teams are often kept separated and rely on documentation to coordinate their development efforts. IP lifecycle management tools can help streamline this workflow and prevent breakdowns in communication. In agile software delivery, frequently, configuration values will be added, deleted, or altered. One team member may modify a hardware allocation value to ensure that the program works more effectively on their own computer.
The Methodics IPLM platform has enabled companies of all sizes to have complete control over the design and integration of digital assets as IPs, whether these assets are hardware blocks, software components, or firmware. In all cases, the base features of Methodics IPLM all contribute to providing the traceability and configuration management checking needed to spot issues early in the process — before they become costly mistakes that impact customers. With a versioned, hierarchical BoM for a project, access control management, seamless Data Management (DM) support, and managed user workspaces. That’s why Methodics IPLM is trusted by 9 of the 10 top semiconductor companies. Configuration management is the process of establishing and maintaining consistency in a product from performance to functionality to physical attributes. Both hardware and software configuration management involve efficiently managing requirements, design, and operational information.
- Specifically, the infrastructure involved in supporting the business depends on configuration management.
- DevOps configuration management promotes the speed, accuracy, and efficiency of the system.
- Utilizing a Configuration Management system helps avoid problems that occur when hardware and software systems are improperly configured.
- Without the CM your system may be compromised with unexpected outages, implementation failure, and lack productivity, reliability, and scalability.
- For infrastructure, that means establishing baselines, configuring applications, enforcing compliance, and more.
By doing so, you can avoid inadvertently configuring features that are either not yet available or no longer supported in the software. For example, if you use configuration files, their directories might be owned by a single production group. If files in a directory can only have one owner, it’s much easier to track who makes changes.
IT teams typically use specialized software to define system settings—as well as build and maintain systems according to those baseline settings. Using configuration management tools, administrators can set up an IT system, such as a server or workstation, then build and maintain other servers and workstations with the same settings. IT teams use configuration assessments and drift analyses to continuously identify systems that have strayed from the desired system state and need to be updated, reconfigured, or patched.
Historically, mission-critical systems offered a large amount of controls (which amount to system configuration), but also required significant human operator training. Consider the complex array of operator controls in the NASA spacecraft control center in Figure 14-1. In modern computer systems, such training is no longer feasible for the majority of the industry. Configuration management also implies that analyzing the development environment and ensuring that the test environment is identical is a simple task. This reduces deployment risk since the program is more certain to execute as predicted, and the tests conducted against it are indicative of the software’s actual delivery areas. The next stage is to check that the project is proceeding according to schedule by testing and validating against predefined baselines.