In today’s world of ““automate all the things”” we hear a lot of questions about the difference between application configuration management and application release automation solutions. We understand the confusion between these related but different concepts and at Orca, we love to simplify things. So here goes…
Application Release Automation is limited in scope
Whether you call it application deployment, continuous delivery (CD), or application release automation (ARA), these tools do exactly that – they automate the release of application components from Development to Production. Part of this release process may be to deploy configuration files (what some vendors like to call “config file management”) or execute scripts to ensure the middleware is configured appropriately to run the application (for example, is this AppPool the correct runtime version?).
Once the application is deployed to its target, the configuration is no longer managed by your release tool. As far as it’s concerned, its job is now done.
However, once the application (including its configurations) is deployed to its target, the configuration is no longer managed by your release tool. As far as it’s concerned, its job is now done. At this point the configuration is typically monitored from the application performance level, but not down to the configuration setting. So when and if the configuration of your middleware gets changed or someone edits the incorrect line in the app’s configuration file, it may break the application or the many applications that depend on it, causing outages and chaos. Changing this can break that. Even without a full-scale outage you will have inconsistent configurations across environments and/or a lower performing application.
While application release tools are great at releasing the application, their purpose is not to continually manage the configurations, monitor changes, and remediate out-of-band changes. If you only have a release automation tool at your disposal and something goes awry, expect to spend hours to days finding the needle in the haystack configuration change that’s been made. ARA tools are simply not built for the ongoing management that “living, breathing” software requires.
Application Configuration Management & Automation
Orca does some very useful things to really improve the work life of Configuration Managers, Release Managers, and DevOps teams in complex, large scale Windows and Linux environments.
Orca manages and monitors the configurations of your Windows and Linux middleware as well as your application’s configuration files. As an automation solution, Orca not only inventories all of your configuration settings, it intelligently pushes configuration changes to all your environments using out-of-the-box integrations.
The key to Orca’’s robust middleware configuration management is its ability to access dynamic configuration sources. Orca manages configuration settings that can only be retrieved or changed via an API call into a specified service. An example would be changing a setting in IIS. Some of the settings can only be managed via interactive API.
No one likes to be “that guy” searching through logs and spreadsheets to figure out which line of code was fat-fingered or what setting was changed where.
Orca is purpose-built to: A) find and B) unambiguously display that “needle in a haystack” that engineers need when dealing with changed configurations.
Configuration Normalization Engine
As part of its automation, Orca provides a normalized version of your configurations in a human friendly format where all of your configurations are conveniently stored in an accessible, centralized location.
Using a Release Management system to detect drift?
Configuration management systems need to be able to detect drift and correct drift with true auto remediation. Many release tools claim configuration management but they simply cannot and do not compare expected configurations with current configurations across hundreds or thousands of servers and many environments.
Most organizations want to define configuration drift and compliance, but release tools do not present the option to apply those organization-specific compliance rules. (To read more about Orca’’s application of compliance rules click here.) And while truly automated remediation sets the configurations to the expected state, release tools are limited to simply executing scripts that make one-off configuration changes as part of a deployment process. Beyond just the release process, a true application configuration system manages the app-centric properties of the application and middleware configurations as well as the relationships between application systems.
Wrong tool for the job
It comes down to your needs…
If you need continuous delivery, get a release automation tool. If instead you need automated drift detection, automated drift correction and the ability to bulk deploy configuration changes across your targeted application ecosystem, take a look at Orca.
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