Configuration management can drastically improve the integrity of servers over time by providing a framework for automating processes and keeping track of changes made to the system environment. This series will introduce you to the concepts behind Configuration Management and give you a practical overview of how to use Ansible, Puppet and Chef to automate server provisioning.

As a broader subject, configuration management (CM) refers to the process of systematically handling changes to a system in a way that allows the system to maintain integrity over time. In this tutorial, we will discuss how configuration management works for servers, and what to consider when choosing a tool for building your configuration management infrastructure.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of creating an automated server provisioning using Ansible, a configuration management tool that provides a complete automation framework and orchestration capabilities. We will focus on the language terminology, syntax and features necessary for creating a simplified example to fully automate the deployment of an Ubuntu 18.04 web server using Apache.

This guide will focus on the features and characteristics of Puppet, a popular configuration management tool capable of managing complex infrastructures in a transparent way, using a master server to orchestrate the configuration of the nodes. In order to give you a hands-on experience with the tool, we will walk you through the process of creating a simplified provisioning example to fully automate the deployment of a web server using Apache.

This tutorial will walk you through the process of automating server provisioning using Chef, a powerful configuration management tool that leverages the Ruby programming language to automate infrastructure administration and provisioning. We will focus on the language terminology, syntax, and features necessary for creating a simplified example to fully automate the deployment of an Ubuntu 18.04 web server using Apache.