The Ultimate List of Provisioning and Configuration Management Tools

Ansible is an open-source software platform for configuring and managing computers. It combines multi-node software deployment, ad hoc task execution, and configuration management. It manages nodes over SSH or PowerShell and requires Python (2.4 or later) to be installed on them. Modules work over JSON and standard output and can be written in any programming […]

Puppet is an open source configuration management utility. It runs on many Unix-like systems as well as on Microsoft Windows, and includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. The current version is Puppet 4.

The BMC BladeLogic Automation Suite is a solution for automated management, control, and enforcement of configuration changes in the data center. It provides a cross-platform solution for managing both physical and virtual assets — in the traditional data center and in the cloud.

ChangeMan® ZMF (formerly Serena ChangeMan ZMF) protects corporate assets and helps developers get more done in less time. It’s a comprehensive, automated change management system for reliably implementing mainframe software changes from development to testing to production. ChangeMan ZMF treats change management as a business issue by giving key stakeholders visibility into the release process—thus […]

CFEngine is an open source configuration management system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems, including the unified management of servers, desktops, consumer and industrial devices, embedded networked devices, mobile smartphones, and tablet computers.

Terraform, by HashiCorp, is a tool for safely and efficiently building, combining, and launching infrastructure. From physical servers to containers to SaaS products, Terraform is able to create and compose all the components necessary to run any service or application.

Chef is a configuration management tool written in Ruby and Erlang. It uses a pure-Ruby, domain-specific language (DSL) for writing system configuration “recipes”. Chef Delivery is Chef’s venture in the the CD space and at the moment is by invitation only.

Congruit is a lightweight configuration management and automation tool. It is written in Go but works through Bash. It manages shell scripts you created for configure your Linux platforms. The configuration management tool that loves Bash!

SSH is a software package that enables secure system administration and file transfers over insecure networks. It is used in nearly every data center, in every larger enterprise.

Chef is a configuration management tool used to streamline the task of configuring and maintaining a company’s servers, and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Rackspace, Internap, Amazon EC2, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, SoftLayer, and Microsoft Azure to automatically provision and configure new machines. Chef contains solutions for both small and large scale systems, […]

Salt platform or SaltStack is a Python-based open source configuration management and remote execution application. Supporting the “infrastructure-as-code” approach to deployment and cloud management, it competes primarily with Puppet, Chef, and Ansible.

Rudder is an open source audit and configuration management utility to help automate system configuration across large IT infrastructures. Rudder relies on a lightweight local agent installed on each managed machine (derived from CFEngine 3).

Pallet is a platform for agile and programmatic automation of infrastructure in the cloud, on server racks or directly on virtual machines. Pallet provides cloud provider and operating system independence, and allows for customization.

kops helps you create, destroy, upgrade and maintain production-grade, highly available, Kubernetes clusters from the command line. AWS (Amazon Web Services) is currently officially supported, with GCE in beta support , and VMware vSphere in alpha, and other platforms planned.

Quali’s Cloud Sandbox Software allows you to create and publish sandboxes that are replicas of infrastructure and application configurations and use them for development, testing, demos, training, and support. CloudShell works by letting you model, orchestrate, and deploy on-prem, cloud, and hybrid environments so that all teams in the DevOps lifecycle have consistent access to […]

Bcfg2 (pronounced “bee-config”) is a configuration management tool developed in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division of Argonne National Laboratory. Bcfg2 aids in the infrastructure management lifecycle – configuration analysis, service deployment, and configuration auditing.

RackHD is a technology stack created for enabling hardware management and orchestration, to provide cohesive APIs to enable automated infrastructure. In a Converged Infrastructure Platform (CIP) architecture, RackHD software provides hardware management and orchestration (M&O). It serves as an abstraction layer between other M&O layers and the underlying physical hardware. Developers can use the RackHD […]

Consul is a distributed, highly-available, and multi-datacenter aware tool for service discovery, configuration, and orchestration. Consul enables rapid deployment, configuration, and maintenance of service-oriented architectures at massive scale.

Cobbler is a Linux provisioning server that facilitates and automates the network-based system installation of multiple computer operating systems from a central point using services such as DHCP, TFTP, and DNS.

Micro Focus Cloud Service Automation (CSA) is cloud management software that automates the management of cloud-based IT-as-a-service, from order to provision, and retirement. Micro Focus Cloud Service Automation orchestrates the provisioning and deployment of complex IT services such as of databases, middleware, and packaged applications (i.e., ERP, Exchange). The software speeds deployment of application-based services […]

Packer is free and open-source software for creating identical machine images or containers for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. It was written by Mitchell Hashimoto and became one of the products in his company Hashicorp’s software toolkits as open-source proprietary-managed software. It is associated with the Vagrant container management tool, also written by […]

Vagrant, by HashiCorp, is an open-source tool that creates and configures virtual development environments. It can be seen as a wrapper around virtualization software such as VirtualBox, VMware, KVM, LXC and around configuration management software such as Ansible, Chef, Salt or Puppet.

Manage application changes across platforms, locations, and teams. Dimensions® CM (formerly Serena® Dimensions CM) streamlines the complexity of collaborative parallel development to increase team velocity and ensure release readiness. Dimensions CM secures and protects application IP, supporting secure software development. Additionally, it improves development productivity with collaborative agile development practices, minimizes rework, visualizes & reduces […]

Foreman (also known as The Foreman) is an open source complete life cycle systems management tool for provisioning, configuring and monitoring of physical and virtual servers. Foreman has deep integration to configuration management software, with Puppet, Chef, Salt and other solutions through plugins, which allows you to automate repetitive tasks, deploy applications and manage change […]

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This technical research note, examines why declarative automation is especially suited to application deployment in today’s enterprise IT environments and details the key benefits of this approach.