My first experience with configuration management

Why is Configuration Management (CM) so important? The simple answer is: Because the correct configuration is one of the three critical parts for running a non-trivial piece of software successfully. (The other two are the actual code and the data.)

I still remember my first project when I was fresh out of university. While the team was great, everything else was a bloody nightmare. In particular the software, for which we developed, did not support configuration management in any way. Staging was basically done by exporting from the development system (DEV), manually finding and changing values in the export (at least it was plain ASCII), and importing it on the test system (TEST), and so on.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, there actually was no TEST environment. The customer had decided to save the money, so we had a combined DEV+TEST system. More than once we ended up with the production system (PROD) accessing the DEV+TEST database. You may ask why we did not simply write a script to change the various settings automatically. Well, we were not allowed to, because it was not budgeted for.

And it gets even worse, because I actually lied to you when describing the staging process before. The problem was that while the export from one environment worked fine, the import into another did not after some time. It was basically a limitation of the maximum size the import file could have. Our solution (after consultation with the vendor!) was to shut down both environments (DEV+TEST and PROD) and copy the binary storage files that held the development from one to the other. Then all the relevant values had to be adjusted manually on PROD, and then a test to be performed.

Of course that test failed a couple of times until all the changes had been done and recognized by the system (caching can be a dangerous thing). And because we were interfacing with at least five other systems (all PROD!) such a test run was not so easy. To make things more complicated, every set of test data (to be manually prepared on all surrounding systems) could only be used once. So we made a lot of “friends” with the folks operating the other systems.

We pulled a few all-nighters and somehow got things up and running (there were many other nice things with the software, of course). But it was frustrating and very inefficient. Since then configuration has been something that I deeply care about. And you probably understand why now.