In the past, maintaining technology infrastructure, deploying applications, and provisioning environments involved many manual, iterative tasks. But in today’s DevOps arena, true automation of these tasks has arrived. The benefits of automated configuration management range from time savings to elimination of human error.
Meanwhile, configuration management platforms and tools have converged directly with the world of open source. In fact, several of the very best tools are fully free and open source. From server orchestration to securely delivering high-availability applications, open source tools ranging from Chef to Puppet can bring organizations enormous efficiency boosts.
The prevalence of cloud computing, and the open platforms that facilitate it, have contributed to the benefits organizations can reap from configuration management tools. Cloud platforms allow teams to deploy and maintain applications serving thousands of users, and the leading open source configuration management tools have wrapped in ways to automate all relevant processes.
The Linux Foundation recently announced the release of its 2016 report “Guide to the Open Cloud: Current Trends and Open Source Projects.” This third annual report provides a comprehensive look at the state of open cloud computing, and includes a section on configuration management tools for DevOps. You can download the report now, and one of the first things to notice is that it aggregates and analyzes research, illustrating how trends in containers, configuration managers, and more are reshaping cloud computing. The report provides descriptions and links to categorized projects central to today’s open cloud environment.
In this series, we are calling out many of these projects from the guide, by category, providing extra insights on how the overall category is evolving. Below, you’ll find a collection of several important configuration tools for DevOps and the impact that they are having, along with links to their GitHub repositories, all gathered from the Guide to the Open Cloud:
Configuration Management
Ansible is Red Hat’s open source IT automation engine for cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and other IT needs on multi-tier architectures. Ansible on GitHub
Chef is a configuration management tool to automate infrastructure. It manages servers in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment. Chef on GitHub
Puppet is an open source server automation tool for configuration and management. It works on Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification. Puppet on GitHub
Salt Open is orchestration and configuration management software to manage infrastructure and applications at scale. It’s the upstream open source project for SaltStack and runs on Linux and Windows. Salt on GitHub
Learn more about trends in open source cloud computing and see the full list of the top open source cloud computing projects. Download The Linux Foundation’s Guide to the Open Cloud report today!
