Just like how the clown pops up in the movie "IT" and terrifies the audience, managing IT infrastructure was a similar experience for system administrators until now. How did it change? Let me tell you.

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Configuration management software is one of the set of infrastructure automation tools that system administrators and DevOps engineers use to manage the huge IT infrastructure of their organizations.

Twenty years back , system administrators who would manage Windows or Linux machines had to go to each and every machine and configure them. Be it changing the IP address to re-installing the whole operating system of machines.

Some years later, system administrators started to remotely manage the machines using telnet which was an unsecure protocol that could be easily captured by packet sniffers such as Wireshark. Then, they started using the more secure protocol (i.e) SSH. Even though they could manage all the machines from little cubicles in their offices, they had to still connect to thousands of machines one by one. This introduced configuration errors especially where the configuration might not be applied to a machine as desired. Yes, system administrators are humans, so it did introduce human errors where the sleepy administrator could apply faulty configuration to the machines and wreck them all.

Then, with the rise of programming seeping its way into system administration, admins would write little scripts in PowerShell (if it was a Windows machine) or Bash (in case of Linux machines) and manage them. This eased their pain but to a extent, as they had to still loop over to every machine and execute them by their IP address or hostname of the machines.
Now, its 2024. With the emergence of cloud computing and microservice architecture, managing thousands of these little minions (another cute nickname for machines in my glossary :D) is just pure hell if we had to do it in the above mentioned ways. Thankfully, great people came with the idea of configuration management software.

Right now, in the market we have a lot of tools such as Salt (a.k.a SaltStack), Puppet, Chef, Ansible. Cloud vendors have their proprietary solutions as well. But in the end, one must win in this shark tank, right?

It’s Ansible that wins. But why did this guy win? What’s the secret to his success. I will tell you in the next post.

Till then, be curious and keep learning!

Readers, a huge "thank you" for reading my post till the end.