If you have been responsible for creating and maintaining application infrastructure and configuration in the past, you have most likely experienced what is called configuration drift. Configuration drift is the name for the phenomenon where the configuration between servers in acceptance and the production environment differs. Or, even worse, when having multiple servers in the production environment, it might be the case that the configuration of these is not always the same.

The most common cause of configuration drift is manual change. When making changes manually, maybe under the pressure of a production issue, there is always the risk that you apply different settings to different servers or hosts. And if you ever need to scale out and add another server to your production environment, the chance of that server taking on the same configuration of...