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This does not manage a server, it provisions a server. The whole point of configuration management software is to bring your software into a desired state from any actual state the server may be in. This rests on the notion that configuration drifts, i.e. for long running services a server gets misconfigured eventually for a variety of reasons.

Bottom line, if you are just running a small startup with a few servers and a few people, then by all means use FSS, but eventually you will need real CM.



The CM system I'm using "journals" every change it makes to the system, so if you later remove or change a file or script in your CM repository, it undoes the old change. This eliminates virtually all configuration drift, provided you aren't making changes by hand outside of the CM system (which you should never do anyways).

This system has been managing about 100 servers and several hundred desktops at a single site since 2009, so the approach does scale. It has some problems that declarative solutions like Puppet solve, but at the same time it solves problems that Puppet/Chef/others have.


Which CM system?


In the cloud, provisioning a server might be the only management that you do. In fact, arguably, SHOULD do.

Servers are now disposable.




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