Chapter 12: Tools for Cloud Infrastructure (TCI)- Configuration Management

Question 1

What makes central configuration management necessary/beneficial?

Answer 1

• numerous system in different environment (Development, QA, Production) need to be managed
• preferably automated provisioning

Question 2

What do Configuration Management Tools allow?

Answer 2

• to define the desired state of the systems in an automated way

Question 3

Name a few options for configuration management tools?

Answer 3

• Ansible
• Puppet
• Chef
• Salt

Question 4

What is Ansible?

Answer 4

• open source configuration management tool
• agentless
• works through SSH
• can automate infrastructure provisioning, applicatoin deployment and orchestration

Question 5

What makes Ansible special and what are consequences?

Answer 5

• agentless architecture
• there maintenance tasks are restricted to a single management node and not to every managed instance in the cluster
• thus all updates to managed nodes are pushed via SSH to lists of nodes that are managed through inventory files
• the nodes can be grouped together

Question 6

What are Playbooks in Ansible?

Answer 6

• configuration, deployment and orchestratoin language

Question 6

What is Puppet in context of Configuration management?

Answer 6

• open source configuration management tool
• uses agent/server model to configure the system
• Puppet agent and puppet server
• also supports agentless model to manage target systems
• has also tooling around it, like PuppetDB for centralized reporting or puppet forge