Much has been written on the rise of the devops culture and the use of configuration as code tools such as Chef. Puppet and DSC.
However once you have your infrastructure configuration built as code and deployed, how do you validate that it is actually being applied as expected?
Once you have more than a handful of nodes and multiple roles you can’t easily just manually log on to the servers and check. (Not to mention this is totally counter intuitive in the pets vs cattle approach to infrastructure management)
I’ve run into a tool from a start up called Scriptrock called Guardrail. It’s whole reason for existing is to solve the problem of validating deployed configuration. It takes the philosophy that you can’t rely on the police to police themselves. If Chef or DSC says it applied the config can you be sure it actually did?
Guardrail also can take a config policy and scaffold out a Chef, puppet or DSC configuration to speed up automating deployments.
I wholeheartedly recommend checking not out. They have a basic hosted trial option that allows for a rapid POC.
24 by 7, 3 6 5 