Poor configuration management could tap the breaks on any organization’s attempts to embrace a more nimble, cloud-based, DevOps practice.
To prevent this, technology leaders have to establish the right scope, processes, and tools for configuration management at the organization, Gartner urges.
Think of configuration management as a state-of-the-union for organizational technology, which empowers organizations to harness their technology much better than relying on the mental map of a long-standing IT employee.
How does Configuration Management Influence Software Development?
Configuration management is the practice of recording the current and future state for any technology asset at the organization, including software and hardware. Under this broad umbrella, organizations may establish a pipeline for future software development, code the current IT infrastructure state, and storing current servers.
A current snap shot of the business’ technology landscape is vital to information full cycle software development, whether you’re tackling on site software development or considering the benefits of outsourcing software development.
Prior to DevOps, cloud computing, and automation, configuration management was an entirely manual, administrative task. Today, organizations can enable tools to track change history, codify a build process, or highlight steps that are out of line with organizational goals.
Configuration management should enable business leaders to address four important questions:
1. What services are running?
2. What condition are each of those services in today?
3. How did they reach their current condition?
4. What was the objective of these changes?
How Does Configuration Management Benefit a Business?
Documenting and understanding the organization’s technology landscape is critical in this age of rampant development. If no one is looking at the big bigger, it’s likely many of the details – even important ones – will be lost along the way. Business leaders can harness technology as an overall strategy by employing configuration management to:
• Ensure asset recovery. Even the best technology sometimes fails, and configuration management supports easily recoverable assets, as well as enables an easy rollback if bad code occurs is an update.
• Smooth scaling. When organizations understand what level of resources are required to make the technology operate smoothly, it’s simply to simply adjust the number of servers as need scales, as opposed to waiting for functionality to fail.
• Improve reliability. Downtime is costly; detrimental in some businesses. Often, it’s poor deployments that occur when production servers act differently from test services, but configuration management ensures test environment mirror production environments, supporting better testing and boosting site reliability.
• Efficient on boarding. A clear map of the technology and documentation of its role and functionality can minimize the amount of fumbling around new employees are required to do to operate and learn systems. This of course equates to faster ramp up and earlier productivity.
• Eliminates waste. A blueprint of technology helps organizations eliminate duplicity in the technology, thereby reducing the cost.
Configuration management supports software development methodologies. Agile project management is bolstered by configuration release management because it provides a framework to management changes safely – and rapidly.
Organizations can also elect to task individual development teams with configuration management specific to their infrastructure.
How Does Release Management Benefit Software Development?
Keeping a clear record of technology at a high level is a game changer, but so is properly management individual changes as well.
Organizations that employ release management establish a single process for releases, and document it. This can eliminate the chaos that often accompanies a new launch and encourages collaboration between developers and operations to avoid any nasty surprises after the launch.
As businesses increasingly embrace agile software development, it only makes sense to approach deployments as more iterative and closely managing any change for potential impact and future learning.
Leveraging these strategic, mature approaches to technology assets requires experiences professionals who can approach software development and overall IT infrastructure from a strategic perspective. From project managers to cloud computing service providers, TechGenies can equip businesses to manage the big picture while perfecting the small details. Contact us today at info@techgenies.com to learn more.
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