A Short History of Infrastructure Management

The beginning

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…

We would order servers and wait for months until they arrived. To make our misery worse, even after they came, we’d wait for weeks (sometimes even months) until they were placed in racks and provisioned.

At that time, only a select few people could access these servers. If someone did something that should not have been done, we would face an extended downtime. On top of that, nobody knew what was running on those servers.

Manual provisioning and installations were a nightmare because even after putting a lot of effort into documentation, given enough time, the state of the servers would always diverge from the documentation. Sysadmins were the key people who could handle these servers.

Configuration management and relevant tools

Managing the configuration means tracking and controlling changes in the software. Configuration management tools enable us to determine what was changed, who changed it and much more.

Then came configuration management tools like CFEngine.

Pros

CFEngine was based on promise theory and was capable of putting a server into the desired state no matter what its actual state was.

It allowed us to specify the state of static infrastructure and have a reasonable guarantee that it will be achieved.

Another big advantage it provided is the ability to have, more or less, the same setup for different environments. Servers dedicated to testing could be (almost) the same as those assigned to production.

Cons

Unfortunately, usage of CFEngine and similar tools was not yet widespread. We had to wait for virtual machines before automated configuration management became a norm. However, CFEngine was not designed for ...