

Configuration Drift and Next-gen Configuration Management - uggedal
http://blog.lusis.org/blog/2012/05/24/configuration-drift-and-next-gen-cm/

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gosub
Lately I've been thinking about the concept of config management, and I've
come to some conclusions:

1) Configuration management has the same problem object oriented programming
and imperative programming have: state is intermixed with identity and
behavoiur. This makes it more difficult to reason about.

2) Configuration management is too low level: One should not describe the
state of configuration to keep, but the desided behavoiur of the system. The
configuration part should be automatically derived.

3) Configuration management breaks locality: If a config manager is running,
the point of change of the system is not in the config files anymore. If I
have a problem and the documented solution tells me to change a particular
configuration, an additional step is added toward the solution. Also, if
something doesn't work as expected, configuration management must be
additionally investigated as a possible source for the problem.

