On a near-daily basis, I get questions from infrastructure professionals about how best to rearchitect, optimize, and reorganize around infrastructure as code. No matter what stage they are on the journey, they quickly come to the same realization:

It is impossible to do without significant automation.

There are many products in this space, each with varying approaches on leading customers to the promise of continuous delivery. At a core level is configuration management: tools that ensure infrastructure is configured in a consistent, reliable way.

In a new report, Robert Stroud, Charlie Betz and I explore the landscape of vendor solutions in this space. We define what exactly we mean by “configuration management” (it is not as simple as it sounds), how it applies to enterprises and provide an overview of the major players. Check it out if you want to see how best to configure infrastructure as code.