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back to article So you think you know all about configuration management

David Norfolk is practice leader with responsibility for development and governance at Bloor Research International. He is on the committee of the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group. Last month El Reg published an article by me that introduces the concepts of configuration management. You can read it here. In this …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    examples please!

    CM tools, and CMDBs, tend to be large and expensive. They also tend to embed workflows, that, for better or worse, tell you how to do your job. They are also a bit like insurance, in that they cost a lot and you only get the benefit in an incident.

    CM is an approach that depends entirely on the organisational size and culture.

    Any real-world examples of CM success in small, medim and large organisations? Which tools? Costs? Timescales?

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    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge
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      Re: examples please!

      CM tools, and CMDBs, tend to be large and expensive.

      How much do you have to shell out for CVS, Subversion, or git?

      Yes, there are commercial products, ranging from "so small as to disappear in the IT budget of any moderately-sized organization" to "pretty damn expensive". But it's also quite possible to do perfectly adequate change and configuration management with free tools and relatively little in-house administration.

      They are also a bit like insurance, in that they cost a lot and you only get the benefit in an incident.

      I use CM every day for all sorts of non-"incident" purposes.

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    2. robaato
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      Re: examples please!

      I use CM for all sorts of work - writing articles, obviously any code, but also configs for machines.

      People doing DevOps are applying CM to deployment processes and machine configurations.

      Various successful examples at www.bcs-cmsg.org.uk from past events and conferences.

      http://bcs-cmsg.org.uk/events/past-events.html

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  2. MyHandle123

    The best CM system is a few text files in /etc.

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    1. robaato
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      A few text files doesn't cut it! Put those text files under SVN or Git, or Mercurial and you will start to get some benefit...

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