DevOps is a cultural strategy for management, using management methods, philosophies, and tools to shorten deployment lead time. When implementing Development Operations strategies, there are many benefits, including more transparent communication, faster times to market, and more focus on improving a business.&nbsp;&nbsp;
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There are three fundamentals in a DevOps strategy.
<ol>
<li>To enhance project flow to expedite the distribution of work from Development Operations to customers.&nbsp;</li>
<li>To use Feedback to optimize applications and to create safe systems of work.&nbsp;</li>
<li>To refine a culture of constant learning that encourages experimentation through trust and a scientific approach.</li>
</ol>
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To do this, DevOps attempts to create high-reliability, built on highly trusted teams, and a continuous development culture. These improvements should take place within individual team members, organizations, and company processes. DevOps' was born from time tested operations resulting from best in class manufacturing models. These refined processes come from successful stores like Toyota.&nbsp; &nbsp;
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<h2>A Brief History of DevOps</h2>
The term DevOps was coined in 2009 by Patrick Debois and inspired by John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's presentation titled "10 Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr".&nbsp;
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To understand DevOps, we start by focusing our attention on the roots of it all. We want to explore the surface layer of a few project management methodologies. First, we will look at the Lean Product &amp; Process Development Movement. It involves production management tools coined by the Toyota Production System in the 1980s. Such as Value Stream Mapping, Kanban boards, and Total Productive maintenance. In 1997 the&nbsp;<a class="editor-rtfLink" href="https://www.lean.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lean Enterprise Institution&nbsp;</a>set out to extend the manufacturing industry's lessons into a reusable framework for any industry. The technology industry immediately recognized the Lean Movement's value, adopted its lessons, and innovated it into a more appropriate project management tool. The key ingredients added to the lean model later forming the DevOps culture were the Agile Movement and the Continuous Development Movement.&nbsp;
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The Agile Movement, also known as Agile modeling, is an iterative and incremental process model. It took the lessons gleaned from mass production optimization, such as breaking large tasks into small batches of single processes and optimizing the feedback cycle to be built into deployments. The Agile Model allows quick updates and rapid production deploys through a flywheel approach.&nbsp;
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The Continuous Development approach releases small updates and has a feedback loop of improvements that shorten the time between source code versions. The source code updates are accepted manually, where the agile movement attempts to make deployment automated. Distilling the golden nuggets from all three methods gives us DevOps.&nbsp;
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So, you likely have some questions.
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<h3>How can DevOps help my company?&nbsp;</h3>
There are virtually unlimited benefits to creating a DevOps centric culture, here are only five.&nbsp;
<ol>
<li>IMPROVED EMPLOYEE MORALE</li>
<li>ALLOW MORE INNOVATION</li>
<li>SEE PROBLEMS AS THEY OCCUR&nbsp;</li>
<li>FASTER PROBLEM RESOLUTION</li>
<li>REDUCING COMPLEXITY</li>
</ol>
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<h3>What can my business do to improve DevOps?</h3>
Well, these five steps will give you a headstart to optimize your DevOps.&nbsp;
<ol>
<li>MAKE WORK VISIBLE&nbsp;</li>
<li>LIMIT WORK IN PROCESS&nbsp;</li>
<li>REDUCE BATCH SIZES&nbsp;</li>
<li>REDUCE THE NUMBER OF HANDOFFS&nbsp;</li>
<li>CONTINUALLY IDENTIFY AND ELEVATE CONSTRAINTS&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
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DevOps is a cultural strategy for management, using management methods, philosophies, and tools to shorten deployment lead time.

What is Devops?

So let me guess. You came up with this fantastic app idea. It will improve your business processes and make life so much better, but you reached your first obstacle, and now you are asking yourself, "How do I find app Developers." For a small business owner, this can be a daunting task. You can post a Facebook status. Your nephew might step up to the plate, or if you are lucky, one of your buddies will refer you to their dev. The next problem is their developer doesn't have any experience creating internal business applications, just WordPress websites. So we hit the chalkboard again and look at some streamlined options.
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<h2>Job boards &amp; Freelancing Websites</h2>
There are 10s of if not 100s of Freelancing Job boards. You can choose to list your job on one of these websites and have people bid on your gig. Some of the most popular options are listed below.
<ul>
<li>Fiverr&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Fiverr is an online marketplace for freelance services. There are developers on Fiverr starting as low as 5 dollars. Most of these freelancers are in the budget market and tend to be of inferior quality and use repurposed code.&nbsp;
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<ul>
<li>Upwork</li>
</ul>
Upwork, formerly oDesk, is an American freelancing platform where enterprises and individuals connect to conduct business. Freelancers bid on gigs, and you accept them for interviews. The Bid process can be useful and problematic at the same time because Developers only bid low to land an interview. There is a bit more oversight built into the process, allowing a safer development process. However, scammers have found a way to exploit it, and you might be charged for work that never gets delivered.&nbsp;
<ul>
<li>Freelancer</li>
</ul>
Freelancer is an Australian freelance marketplace website, which allows potential employers to post jobs that freelancers can then bid to complete, just like Upwork. However, the main difference between Upwork and Freelancer is in the quality of talent. Upwork tends to have a better overall talent quality level.
<ul>
<li>Toptal</li>
</ul>
Toptal is a global remote company that provides a freelancing platform connecting businesses with software engineers, designers, and business consultants. The company has no headquarters. While other job boards have a wide range of skills to choose from, Toptal boils it down to essential business needs. Toptal is in a higher price range from around $35 an hour to $65 an hour.&nbsp;
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<h2>Digital Agencies&nbsp;</h2>
Perhaps you prefer to work with an agency. Picking an agency can be the best choice for startups and mid-market companies. Digital agencies tend to provide the best return of investment. However, not all digital agencies are the right fit for a cash strapped business. Below we examine a few of our top competitors.&nbsp;
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<ul>
<li>Lemon.io&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Lemon.io is like hiring a tailor for finding a dev. They match you with someone in their network who will best fit your needs. They have great talent that comes at a higher cost. Lemon.io Developers start at $40 to $60 an hour. They also provide on-demand CTO services for $2,000 a month.
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<ul>
<li>Godaddy Design services&nbsp;</li>
</ul>
Godaddy Design services are not a full-fledged development option because they only offer static website services. However, if you need second rate design services at the highest cost for a website, they will be a great fit. Their services start at $100 an hour.&nbsp;
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If you are looking for a cashflow-friendly option that allows you to retain control and oversight while guaranteeing 100% satisfaction, you are in luck.&nbsp;
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<h2>Finance My Software&nbsp;</h2>
FinanceMySoftware.com is a development company that focuses on providing best in class software development through a proprietary DevOps process. Our exclusive DevOps strategy enables us to provide a proper risk-free process built around transparency, accountability, and continuous optimization. We take the guesswork out of hiring a development team, and we provide all the security you never had with any other groups.&nbsp;
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<h2>How is Finance My Software the right fit?</h2>
We admit we are not perfect for all businesses. However, we are a pretty darn good option for startups and mid-market companies. Our process is simple. Here are the steps
<ol>
<li>Needs Discovery</li>
<li>Triple Blind Estimation&nbsp;</li>
<li>Contract Negotiation&nbsp;</li>
<li>Downpayment Deposit into Escrow&nbsp;</li>
<li>Notary supervised checkups&nbsp;</li>
<li>After the initial 90 days and 100%, Client Satisfaction is achieved, you release the downpayment from Escrow.</li>
<li>Remaining Installment Payments are funded via Escrow&nbsp;</li>
</ol>
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<h2>&nbsp;</h2>
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With FinanceMySoftware.com you can build your Application with 0% Down, a 12-month payment plan and 
💯% satisfaction guaranteed!

How to find App Developers

Infrastructure as Code or Programmable Infrastructure is the procedure for maintaining, organizing, and deploying various components of a software development pipeline as code, instead of manually configuring individual systems. The fundamental idea of IaC is to view physical systems as if they were software and set up new systems with desired environmental parameters simply by running a script. In this way, environmental parity is maintained across the entire canon of deployment, and version control can be simplified.
<h2>Need for Infrastructure as Code</h2>
The need for IaC emerged while addressing a major pain point in the software development process. Before IaC, all software production followed the &ldquo;Waterfall Model&rdquo;, as detailed below.
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Imagine you are a developer and you just wrote some code for a project. Your code would then make its way to the Quality Assurance team for testing. The problem is, the QA team may not be immediately equipped with the target testing environment. So, QA would then have to contact the ops engineer to kit them out and set everything up before any real testing can begin. This is already a laborious and time-consuming process.
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Then, if QA finds any bugs in your code, they would contact you to fix them. By this time, you would have probably moved on to a new project with a distinctly different target environment. So, when you get back to error-correcting, you might not be set up to use the exact config that you had in the first place.&nbsp;
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This back and forth process meant that a lot of environmental irregularities crept into the deployment process, resulting in post-release crashes. For large-scale companies with a lot of engineering manpower, this may not be such a big problem but it&rsquo;s an absolute nightmare for small companies.&nbsp;
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Startups and small enterprises with limited people on the engineering side would be stuck in an infinite loop of trying to release proper bug-free software. This would also hinder their ability to move on to new projects. Ultimately, this would hurt their revenue and their reputation as a brand.
<h2>Concept of Idempotence in Infrastructure as Code</h2>
Idempotence in IaC is a property that dictates that the deployment protocols always set up an environment independent of its present state. No assumptions are made about existing software. This is achieved by either auto-configuring an existing machine or completely scrapping everything about how the system was previously configured.&nbsp;
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In other words, Idempotence ensures that all systems function uniformly.
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<h2>How do you deploy Infrastructure as Code?</h2>
The most fundamental thing to keep in mind when deploying IaC code is to make frequent use of declarative definition files. A definition file essentially contains instructions about&nbsp; &ldquo;what&rdquo; an environment needs and not the &ldquo;how&rdquo;. In different terms, it means that we explicitly make sure all systems use the same configuration and version of some component but we do not include specific instructions as to &ldquo;how&rdquo; to install them for all machines.
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This abstract approach to configuration ensures a degree of flexibility in the code. It leaves room in the middle for infrastructure providers to use optimized deployment techniques wherever possible. This also helps reduce the technical overhead of maintaining imperative code, something that can add up over time.
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As such, there are no hard and fast syntactical rules for declarative IaC. Different platforms need different frameworks for IaC with support for numerous file formats like JSON, YAML, and XML. Thus, the choice usually comes down to the specific needs of the target platform.
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<h2>Benefits of Infrastructure as Code</h2>
Most of the benefits of IaC help small and medium-sized companies more than large corporations. Previously, software used to be only a thing for the established names out there. Nowadays, groups of independent developers with minimal resources have started to create apps and form startups around them. Over the last decade, as the industry has grown increasingly mobile, a new generation of applications has taken over the market- most of them coming out of startups rather than large companies.
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These apps require frequent updates as user demand for niche features increases. Using the waterfall model, weekly or daily updates would be impossible. A decade ago, products such as MS Office used to be updated bi-annually, but IaC has made version control and timely deployment much easier.
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So, what are the biggest benefits of IaC? Let&rsquo;s have a look.
<h3>Increased Speed and Efficiency&nbsp;</h3>
IaC allows companies to set up entire infrastructure architectures in a very short amount of time. This includes databases, cloud servers, storage equipment, network infrastructure, and much more. Companies can get everything- the development, testing, and staging environments- up and running in no time.
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Additionally, since security protocols are baked into IaC code, it allows developers to move rapidly, without having to think about explicitly securing every node. It also allows for parallelization of the workflow as different testing environments can be staged simultaneously.
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<h3>Reduced Risk and Cost Efficiency&nbsp;</h3>
IaC allows for cheap disaster recovery. Reducing production environments to just code frees up money for companies to provide for new production environments without having to think about failover machines.
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Additionally, thanks to automation, engineers have to spend much less time performing repetitive manual work and can spend more time in high-value endeavors. IaC code can also be written to perform the task of spinning down idle resources, which massively reduces computing costs if a small-scale business is renting server time from a cloud service.
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<h3>Straightforward Compliance and Improved Customer Experience</h3>
IaC requires little to no help in maintaining the production line from humans. Systems are programmed to automatically account for version changes and generate standardized log files. This allows for swift auditing and error resolution.
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As production and version control become relatively error-free, more attention can be given to infrastructure services and managing code. New features can be rolled out to applications much more smoothly. Most importantly, customer satisfaction increases as instances of downtime reduce drastically.&nbsp;

Infrastructure as Code or Programmable Infrastructure is the procedure for maintaining, organizing, and deploying various components of a software development pipeline as code, instead of manually configuring individual systems.

Infrastructure as code

IT Service Management for MSE to Scale in Remote Market
Everyday life has changed drastically following the outbreak of COVID-19; kitchen tables have turned into office desks, and the remote culture has suddenly become a way of life.&nbsp; One of the most critical developments is that businesses and policymakers now require most, if not, all workers to operate remotely rather than on-site.
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Prior to the pandemic, 43 percent of U.S. workers operated remotely on a regular basis, and 69 percent of U.S. companies provided remote jobs to at least several employees. Although current evidence on the scale of remote work is not yet available, it is fair to believe that the figures have increased significantly and will undoubtedly continue to climb.
<h2>What is ITSM?</h2>
IT Service Management (ITSM) is a system of rules, processes, and procedures that control the deployment, enhancement, and support of customer-focused IT services. ITSM strives to continuously enhance the IT customer experience as opposed to other IT management activities that rely on hardware, networks, or processes,in accordance with market goals.
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ITSM refers to a variety of IT management mechanisms that can be applied to both centralized and decentralized processes. The ITSM specialty encompasses a number of frameworks, some of which address industry-specific IT needs, such as those in healthcare, government, or technology. ITSM-enabled businesses see IT as a service,&nbsp; emphasizing to provide valuable resources to clients rather than a department that handles technology.
<h2>What is Small and Mid-Size Enterprise?</h2>
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are corporate organizations that are small in size. They are not a smaller version of larger enterprises. They differ from large companies in incorporating arrangements, response to the environment, management style, and, most notably, competing with other businesses.
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Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play an important role in all economies as they are drivers of creativity and development. The future contribution of information technology in enhancing the productivity of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has long been recognized.
<h2>What Does it Mean for Your MSE?</h2>
The companies are looking for a way to serve the business and respond to demands effectively and efficiently. IT Service Management and similar best-practice systems, such as IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) are part of the remedy, but they necessitate a phase shift in IT organizations.
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ITSM provides various tools for companies to develop management principles for IT services and customer service activities. The tools include quality control, software engineering, process improvement, information security management, and well-known management system principles such as ISO 9000, ITIL, and ISO/IEC.
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Another component of the solution, especially for SME organizations, is the recent growth of Cloud computing, which poses a massive opportunity for SMEs. By making IT services attainable for SMEs with conventional service delivery models, IT services have played a massive role in its growth. Today, Cloud computing necessitates shifts in emphasis as well as in the manner in which IT services are provided and provisioned in an organization.
<h3>Maximum Productivity</h3>
Companies can maximize their productivity using the ITSM discipline and streamline their work processes. They are intended to add order and organization to service-oriented IT divisions by aligning IT priorities with market requirements and goals. It is used as a guide to assist businesses in effectively aligning IT priorities and business goals, especially for customer-focused companies.
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Suppose the organization has now adopted change management. In that case, you are well on your way to establishing an ITSM ecosystem &ndash; it is all about the development and progress of systems, programs, products, and applications.
<h3>ITSM Service Desk</h3>
In ITSM, the service desk is regarded as a primary IT feature that provides a single point of contact to meet and handle visitors, IT employees, clients, and IT priorities. An IT service desk, contact center, or support desk serves as the focal point for incident tickets, service calls, queries, internal complaints, vendor and customer service, and other activities. As a result, it is strongly stressed in both the ITSM discipline and the ITIL system.
<h3>ITSM Framework</h3>
ITIL is the most widely used ITSM platform, although there are several other ITSM systems that companies can use. These systems are geared toward particular sectors or market requirements, such as hospitals, government, and telecommunications. If your company has technology requirements specific to your market, you can look for a platform that meets your particular problems.
<h3>ITSM Processes</h3>
IT has always had processes that were technology-specific. However, ITSM moves the terminology used to characterize these IT processes to be less IT-specific. This, thereby, aligns IT goals with market objectives contributing to the notion that IT service is the heart of the market.
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ITSM processes such as method orientation, proactive measures, distributed sources, integration at the enterprise level, and other efficient management processes play a significant role in boosting the workflow in an organization and enhance productivity. It allows the IT system to focus more on the business aspect by integrating well-balanced technological methods in the processes.&nbsp;
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Rather than focusing on the traditional in-house IT management, ITSM processes encourage outsourcing the IT work to a competent force outside. Especially now that the remote market is booming with the upsurge of the pandemic, ITSM processes are all set to take technology into every household and enhance the businesses, especially for SMEs.
<h2>ITSM Software</h2>
Many tech suites are available to support whole ITSM systems, such as ticketing, operation, events, and any updates, improvements, or issues. These suites are usually sold as ITSM or ITIL systems to assist with IT workflow management. These ITSM product suites provide everything a company needs to run within the environment of their choice and also the ability to deploy any of the functionality they need.

IT Service Management (ITSM) is a system of rules, processes, and procedures that control the deployment, enhancement, and support of customer-focused IT services. ITSM strives to continuously enhance the IT customer experience as opposed to other IT management activities that rely on hardware, networks, or processes,in accordance with market goals.

IT Service Management

Configuration as Code
Application development has come a long way in the past few years. With the development of cloud-native technologies and increased concern of security and operational costs, many new technologies and architectures have evolved. One such architecture is the Configuration as Code.
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Application development is a very complex process involving several Application Programming Interfaces. Popularly known as APIs, they make the job of a developer simpler than it ever was. However, there are some configuration settings we need in our application to get these APIs working. Not just this, configuration settings are needed for a bunch of other tasks.
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In essence, as the complexity of an application increases, the configuration needed also increases. Sometimes, when the applications are too complex, it becomes a hectic task to keep track of all the config files and documents. The only way we can avoid this is by using Configuration as Code (CAC).
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The definition of the configuration of code is pretty obvious. It is the migration of configuration settings among the environments. Remember, a modern application may have more than two environments in many cases.
<h2>Why Use Configuration as Code?</h2>
Configuration as Code (CAC) helps you migrate the configuration easier. It is extremely difficult to migrate all the configuration settings from one environment to the other. This becomes too strenuous and time-consuming when the migrations have to be done between terminal sessions.
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Many companies copy-paste the tangled ball that is environment variables and then modify them as per the requirement. However, doing that won't be very productive in this modern IT space.
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Imagine changing your configuration variables just like your code. You can deploy the configuration variables along with the code in the deployment pipeline. Any changes done to the configuration files will be treated as a change made to a code.
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This has been the dream of many software engineers until the introduction of Configuration as Code (CAC). When you have to modify the configuration files, you'll do it like any other file and then test it on different environments. If you think that's a repetitive task, you can add it to the automated list as well.
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Configuration as Code (CAC) turns the configuration into code, just like the name suggests. This gives us many advantages.
<h3>1. Scalability</h3>
Scalability is one of the primary reasons configuration as a code is gaining more and more popularity. Configuration as Code (CAC) allows us to add, modify, or delete any configuration settings directly. If this is integrated into a continuous integration and delivery pipeline, you could automate many strenuous tasks and save yourself and your team a ton of resources.
<h3>2. Advanced Analysis</h3>
Until now, configuration files were never analyzed like code. This opens up several windows allowing us to perform vulnerability analyses, security analyses, and other standard analyses.
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With these advanced analyses, we can hold the configuration files to the same standard as the other coding files in our company. This strategy promotes overall standardization and leads to consistency in the code.
<h3>3. Traceability</h3>
One of the primary reasons version control systems exist is to trace an issue. Let us say the application is unable to start after the new release. If there is no version controlling, it will be quite challenging to figure out where the issue is.
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Treating Configuration as Code (CAC) gives us the same advantage. If the configuration files are changed, and the application is not functioning as intended, we can easily trace the issue even if it's a configuration error.
<h3>4. Efficiency</h3>
Treating Configuration as Code (CAC) increases the efficiency of both the admins and the developer teams. With this architecture, we can have everything in a single place as a single entity. This makes it much simpler when we're testing the applications. If there are any issues with the app, we'll know them immediately because all the components work together and are tested together, including the configuration files. Gone are the days when developers wasted time figuring out if it's a configuration issue or a code issue.
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<h2>Rules and Implementation of Configuration as Code</h2>
Even though this is an exciting concept, it doesn't have a formal set of guidelines yet. However, there are some rules you must know before starting to code.
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One of the most critical rules is that configuration of code does not mean that you have to add the configuration files directly to a folder. This would potentially give out a lot of vulnerabilities in the application if you know where to look.
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Adding configuration files as general files in the deployment process is dangerous and may lead to some serious damage to the application and possibly the entire company.
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Some people also think that we can add configuration files to the containers instead of the applications directly. However, this approach sets the stage for other inefficiencies. For starters, you will have to restart the containers whenever there is a change to the configurations.&nbsp;
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Another major issue would be environmental migrations. A lot of companies take advantage of the multi-cloud architecture. So if there's a need to change your containers or the environment for some reason, you'll have to fix the entire build pipelines again.
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Instead, in the configuration as a code, the configurations will have a separate pipeline. This allows us to rerun the pipeline when there are new changes without restarting the whole application. The configurations are then migrated among the environments as a build artifact.
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Unlike the previous case, in this one, we can roll back to the previous state if the current configurations fail. This increases the fault tolerance of our application. One thing you must follow when implementing Configuration as Code (CAC) is that you have to ensure that they are committed and tagged differently for easy identification.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Configuration as Code is one of the best models if you have a complex application with several environments and configuration variables to manage. Using Configuration as Code, you can increase the speed at which the apps roll out by cutting down on time to find errors or security issues in the configuration files.&nbsp;

Configuration as Code (CAC) helps you migrate the configuration easier. It is extremely difficult to migrate all the configuration settings from one environment to the other. This becomes too strenuous and time-consuming when the migrations have to be done between terminal sessions.