Krista Wheatley0
Thank you for joining our crowd chat with experts Greg Baker and Ryan Bezdicek. We are talking about the role of configuration management and its relevance in immutable infrastructure and serverless architectures.
Krista Wheatley
We would love to hear from you. Type in your thoughts, opinions, or questions.
Greg Baker
Thanks Krista! We want to talk about config mgmt and its role in the changing world of cloud computing. Agent or agentless? Do we still need heavy config management tools or are lighter weight solutions now preferred?
Ryan Bezdicek
@ghbaker Lighter weight solutions definitely seem to be more favored recently but there is always a use case for the 'old school' puppet/chef options. But in my experience there are rarely advantages to using an agent based management tool when you are using immutable infra.
Greg Baker
I think lighter weight solutions like Ansible have become popular because they put the control in the hands of developers and enable them to quickly create new environments without needing a centralized config mgmt server. Containers support this view.
Greg Baker
Some larger teams resist this due to the complexity of their infrastructure and their regulatory/compliance needs. They need tighter control of the infrastructure tier while also allowing development teams to dictate how their app is deployed and configured. Can we have both?
Ryan Bezdicek
@ghbaker Yeah but there is the other issue. Generating ansible inventory lists can get cumbersome. They do have nice scripts for big vendors, but often times you want some more customization. And if you aren't using immutable infra, config drift is a common concern.