CODEWITHSUNDEEP
configurationconfiguration-management
Yugang Zhou
Yugang Zhou

Reputation: 7283

How about an Application Centralized Configuration Management System?

We have a build pipeline to manage the artifacts' life cycle. The pipline is consist of four stages:

1.commit(runing unit/ingetration tests)
2.at(deploy artifact to at environment and runn automated acceptance tests)
3.uat(deploy artifact to uat environment and run manual acceptance tests) 
4.pt(deploy to pt environment and run performance tests)
5.//TODO we're trying to support the production environment.

The pipeline supports environment varialbles so we can deploy artifacts with different configurations by triggerting with options. The problem is sometimes there are too many configuration items making the deploy script contains too many replacement tasks.

I have an idea of building a centralized configuration managment system (ccm for short name), so we can maintain the configuration items over there and leave only a url(connect to the ccm) replacement task (handling different stages) in the deploy script. Therefore, the artifact doesnt hold the configuration values, it asks the ccm for them.

Is this feasible or a bad idea of the first place?

My concern is that the potential mismatch between the configuration key (defined in the artifact) and value (set in the ccm) is not solved by this solution and may even worse.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1152

Answers (1)

Alberto Zaccagni
Alberto Zaccagni

Reputation: 31580

Configuration files should remain with the project or set as configuration variables where they are run. The reasoning behind this is that you're adding a new point of failure in your architecture, you have to take into account that your configuration server could go down thus breaking everything that depends on it.
I would advice against putting yourself in this situation.

There is no problem in having a long list of environment variables defined for a project, besides that could even mean you're doing things properly.

If for some reason you find yourself changing configuration files a lot (for ex. database connection strings, api ednpoints, etc...) then the problem might be this need to change a lot configurations, which should stay almost always the same.

Upvotes: 2

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