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 arrive. To make our misery worse, even after they come, we’d wait for weeks, sometimes even months, until they are placed in racks and provisioned.

At that time only selective people could access these servers. If someone does something that should not be done, we could 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 without whom no one can handle these servers.

⚙️ Configuration Management

To manage the configuration means to track and control changes in the software. Configuration management tools enable us to determine what was changed, who changed it and much more.

🛠 Configuration Management Tools

Then came configuration management tools. We got CFEngine.

👍 Pros

It 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 were not yet widespread. We had to wait for virtual machines before automated configuration management ...