What is the difference between configuration management and version control?

version-control configuration-management
friedo picture friedo · Oct 29, 2009 · Viewed 44.6k times · Source

Can anyone explain in simple terms what the difference is between configuration management and version control? From the descriptions I've been able to find on various websites, it seems like configuration management is just a fancy term for putting your config files in a source control repository. But others lead me to believe there is a more involved explanation.

Answer

Yishai picture Yishai · Oct 29, 2009

Version control is necessary but not sufficient for configuration management. Version control happens in some central or distributed repository, but says nothing about where any particular version is deployed or used.

Configuration management worries about how to take what is in version control and deploy that consistently to the appropriate places, primarily QA and production, but in a large enough development operation developers as well.

For example, you may keep all of your SQL queries in version control, including your table modification scripts, but that doesn't control when those scripts are deployed to the appropriate database server and kept in sync with the deployment of any other code that relies on that database structure.

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