Automating provisioning

The provisioning is a term that has gained a lot of traction among developers lately. It refers to the activity of setting up and configuring servers with every bit of required software, making it ready for application use. While this sounds a lot like the system operations type of work, developers found it interesting with the rise of cloud services and the tooling surrounding it.

Historically, provisioning implied a lot of manual type of work. There were not as many general purpose automated provisioning tools as there is today. This meant that there were times when provisioning took days or even weeks. Looking through the prism of today's market demands, such a scenario is hardly imaginable. Nowadays, a single application is usually served by several different servers, each of which is targeting a single functionality, such as web (Apache, Nginx, ...), storage (MySQL, Redis, ...), session (Redis, Memcached, ...), static content (Nginx), and so on. We simply cannot...