Configuration Management: What Is It and Why Is It Important?

The first octet is the option code, the second octet is the number of following octets and the remaining octets are code dependent. For example, the DHCP message-type option for an offer would appear as 0x35, 0x01, 0x02, where 0x35 is code 53 for “DHCP message type”, 0x01 means one octet follows and 0x02 is the value of “offer”. An illustration of a typical non-renewing DHCP session; each message may be either a broadcast or a unicast, depending on the DHCP client capabilities. After updates by many subsequent RFCs, it was replaced with RFC 8415, which merged in prefix delegation, and stateless address autoconfiguration. When configuring, many deductions are drawn which are not relevant for describing configurations. Most of the text is configured as fragments of observation and reflection.

Configuration management systems let you consistently define system settings, as well as build and maintain those systems according to those baseline settings. Configuration management helps users and administrators know where certain services exist and what the current state of applications are. Configuration management keeps you from making small or large changes that go undocumented.

More meanings of configuration

Continuous integration is the process of bringing separate software artifacts together into a single location on a frequent basis, for the purposes of verifying that the code integrates properly. The rise of cloud infrastructures has led to the development and adoption of new patterns of infrastructure management. Complex, cloud-based system architectures are managed and deployed through the use of configuration data files. These new cloud platforms allow teams to specify the hardware resources and network connections they need provisioned through human and machine readable data files like YAML. The data files are then read and the infrastructure is provisioned in the cloud.

definition of configuration

Dockerfiles are committed to a Git repository for version tracking and need additional configuration management to deploy them to infrastructure. With the advent of plug and play technology, most configurations can be performed automatically in the case of software configurations. The quality of performance and life of the computer or device depends on its configuration. Most important aspects of a configuration are the speed of the processor, speed and stability provided by the motherboard, speed and size of storage, graphical display and software drivers. Some hardware or software applications have certain minimum configuration in order to provide the minimum performance.

Where Do Pipelines Fit Into Configuration Management”?

An authoritative server denies the request, causing the client to issue a new request. A non-authoritative server simply ignores the request, leading to an implementation-dependent timeout for the client to expire the request and ask for a new IP address. Improve system recovery after a critical event with automated configuration management. If a server goes down for an unknown reason, you can deploy a new one quickly and have a record of any changes or updates that occurred so you can identify the source of the problem. Through automation, a configuration management tool can provision a new server within minutes with less room for error. You can also use automation to maintain a server in the desired state, such as your standard operating environment , without the provisioning scripts needed previously.

definition of configuration

We observed that the algorithm had a good response time from the utilization graph . And you’ll get expert knowledge gained from our success with thousands of customers. We talked briefly about software delivery pipelines, but implementing them requires tooling. Declarative style is important because configuration management is all about knowing the current state of your applications. So when we use configuration management tools, it’s desirable to use a declarative style and specify the end result that we want, not the steps to get there.

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Ansible automates IT processes like provisioning and configuration management. Learn the basics of Ansible with this introduction to key concepts. Red Hat works with the greater open source community on automation technologies. Our engineers help improve features, reliability, and security to make sure your business and IT performs and remains stable and secure.

However, since its IP address has changed, any ongoing connections will be broken. An option exists to identify the vendor and functionality of a DHCP client. The information is a variable-length string of characters or octets which has a meaning specified by the vendor of the DHCP client. One method by which a DHCP client can communicate to the server that it is using a certain type of hardware or firmware is to set a value in its DHCP requests called the Vendor Class Identifier . This method allows a DHCP server to differentiate between the two kinds of client machines and process the requests from the two types of modems appropriately.

In the computing industry, the term configuration refers to the hardware and software specifications of a computing system and its attached devices. The term configuration may also refer to the actual settings of a computer application. These settings can either be preset by definition of configuration programmers, or manually configured by the applicationʻs user. Learn about best practices—Successfully implementing configuration management isn’t a one-and-done task. It takes time and work to continually ensure that all new software is appropriately audited and tracked.

definition of configuration

A generalized max-min rate allocation policy and its distributed implementation using the abr flow control mechanism. A simple abr switch algorithm for the weighted max-min fairness policy. As an optional client behavior, some broadcasts, such as those carrying DHCP discovery and request messages, may be replaced with unicasts in case the DHCP client already knows the DHCP server’s IP address. The communication between the relay agent and the DHCP server typically uses both a source and destination UDP port of 67.

For example, in the case of Windows-based operating systems, on selecting the “Properties” option on “My Computer,” information on the operating system version, processor details and RAM information are provided. The same information about the computer configuration can be obtained through the command “msinfo32” in an MS-DOS prompt. The term is very common in computer science and mathematics, and in scientific and technological fields in general. Thus, for example, two scientists won a 1962 Nobel Prize for their description of the configuration of the DNA molecule.

This removes a potential organizational dependency bottleneck of a software development team waiting for resources from a separate system administration team. In the early years of internet application development, hardware resources and systems administration were primarily performed manually. System administrators wrangled configuration data while manually provisioning and managing hardware resources based on configuration data. During the 1950s the United States Department of Defense developed a technical management discipline to track changes in the development of complex systems. It gave this system and various iterations very technical names, until in 2001 it published a consolidated guidebook that established the technical management system now called configuration management.

Trust & security

On large networks that consist of multiple links, a single DHCP server may service the entire network when aided by DHCP relay agents located on the interconnecting routers. Such agents relay messages between DHCP clients and DHCP servers located on different subnets. Configuration management is a necessary tool for managing complex software systems. Lack of configuration management can cause serious problems with reliability, uptime, and the ability to scale a system. Many current software development tools have configuration management features built in. Bitbucket offers a powerful system for configuration management that is built around Git pull request workflows and CI/CD pipelines.

This information should not be considered complete, up to date, and is not intended to be used in place of a visit, consultation, or advice of a legal, medical, or any other professional. We’ll have to change the configuration of the system to accommodate the new server. Its value is one for small queue lengths and drops sharply as queue length increases. ERICA+ uses an hyperbolic function for calculating value of the Fraction. Architectural proposals from 2008 involve authenticating DHCP requests using 802.1x or PANA . An IETF proposal was made for including EAP in DHCP itself, the so-called EAPoDHCP; this does not appear to have progressed beyond IETF draft level, the last of which dates to 2010.

  • Each database package comes with its own world of configuration options, performance sensitivities, bugs, and tools.
  • The GW fair problem is to find the rate vector equal to the GW fair allocation, i.e.,.
  • Having configuration data organized and added to a repository enables collaboration and visibility into the system’s configuration.
  • Continuous delivery is the process of ensuring that software is always in a releasable state.
  • But companies that embrace DevOps want both stability of their deployed assets and frequency of change.

So you might want to look into some different key concepts, such as IaC and build and release pipelines. But before we get to that, I need to quickly discuss a concept to consider when comparing tools. You’ll hear about this terminology a lot if you go out and start looking into different configuration management tools. So, it makes sense to have a firm grasp of what declarative https://globalcloudteam.com/ style is, why it’s important, and why so many people are talking about it. Like agile, configuration management gives teams the confidence to move quickly with their changes. Under agile practices, the company gives configuration management responsibilities to the development teams, empowering them to provision, configure, and manage their own infrastructure.

configuration | Intermediate English

Configuration management makes it so that when we’ve put out bad code, we can go back to the state of our software before the change. Ansible, Salt Stack, Chef, and Puppet are IT automation frameworks. These frameworks automate many traditional system administrators’ processes. Each framework uses a series of configuration data files — usually YAML or XML — that are evaluated by an executable. Configuration data has historically been hard to wrangle and can easily become an afterthought.

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Some configuration options feel like they should have been included for free. Improve your vocabulary with English Vocabulary in Use from Cambridge. We tried the furniture in different configurations to see which fit best.

General weighted fairness: definition

The activity level inherently captures the notion of marking, i.e., when a source is bottlenecked elsewhere, then activity level times the fairshare is the actual fairshare of the bottleneck source. The computation of activity level can be done locally and is an O operation, compared to Ocomputations required in consistent marking . Note the 5-tuplerepresents an instant of the bandwidth sharing problem. When all weights are equal the allocation is equivalent to the general max-min fair allocation as defined in . A simple centralized algorithm for solving the above problem would be to first, find the correct allocation vector for the bottleneck links.

We looked for things like easy connections, times of day that matched his sleep schedule, and ideal seating configurations before we made our choice. Each game generates a brand new world populated with a unique configuration of trees, plains and mountains, making it ideal for exploring. In customer relationship management , customer lifecycle is a term used to describe the progression of steps a customer goes… Generally, a configuration is the arrangement – or the process of making the arrangement – of the parts that make up a whole. In today’s business world, managed services are more critical than ever. DisclaimerAll content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only.

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PCMag supports Group Black and its mission to increase greater diversity in media voices and media ownerships. Self-sovereign identity is a model for managing digital identities in which individuals or businesses have sole ownership … The way in which a computer and peripheral equipment are interconnected and programmed to operate as a system. Form or figure as determined by the arrangement of parts; contour; outline. Photo editing software is used to manipulate or enhance digital images.

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