Chapter 8: Exploring Continuous Configuration Automation

Until now, we have worked with single VMs, deploying and configuring them manually. This is nice for labs and very small environments, but if you have to manage bigger environments, this is a very time-consuming and even boring job. It's also very easy to make mistakes and forget things, such as the slight differences between VMs, not to mention the concomitant stability and security risks. For example, choosing the wrong version during deployment will result in consistency issues, and performing an upgrade later is a tedious process.

Automating deployment and configuration management is the ideal way to mitigate this boring task. However, after a while, you might notice some problems with that approach. There are so many reasons why there are problems, and some of the reasons for failure are listed here:

• The script fails because something changed, caused by, for instance, a software update.
• There is...