Taking Advantage of Sophisticated Configuration

Remote configuration

Configuration files are powerful, but they are not a panacea. Consider distributed systems where the code is possibly running in the cloud inside containers. There may be multiple instances of the program running at the same time. Updating a configuration file inside multiple containers at the same time is not a simple thing. In many cases, it requires a new deployment, which requires running a lot of tests and possibly even some temporary down time. In practice, there is almost no difference between changing the code and changing a configuration file.

Remote configuration is an approach for managing a configuration in a distributed system. It addresses many of the problems associated with using configuration files. The concept is that the configuration data is stored in a central highly available store. You could roll your own using a database or a shared file system, but it is probably in your best interest to use an ...