Comparison
Configuration managementvsProvisioning
Configuration management
an agent installs the packages, writes the files and restarts the service on machines that already exist, over and over.
Bringing the inside of an already-running machine to a desired state — packages, files, users, services — repeatedly. It was the dominant discipline when servers were long-lived, and immutable infrastructure has taken most of its work away by rebuilding the image instead. It remains genuinely necessary wherever machines are long-lived and cannot simply be replaced, which is most estates that predate containers.
Full entry →Provisioning
the machine, the network and the disk are created and exist, and nothing has yet been installed on any of them.
Creating and wiring the infrastructure resources themselves — instances, networks, load balancers, databases. It is the layer where declarative tooling is strongest, because cloud APIs are already resource-shaped. Distinguishing it from what happens inside those resources is the distinction that decides whether you need a configuration management tool at all.
Full entry →