The process of managing and provisioning infrastructure through automated tools.

Ansible is a popular open-source tool for automating configuration management.

Applying the same configuration multiple times results in the same state without side effects.

To track changes and maintain history of configurations.

Managing infrastructure using machine-readable configuration files.

Consistency and repeatability across environments.

YAML is widely used for its readability in configuration files.

It reduces manual errors and accelerates deployments.

The divergence of actual system state from the desired configuration.