As Bob Aiello predicted at the beginning of 2010, last year was a busy one for Configuration Management (CM) professionals, taking on more tasks and extended responsibilities in a cost-conscious business climate.

Thankfully, we're seeing fewer large-scale rationalizations at the moment, but efficiency and reliability are still very much key drivers for CM in 2011. Having adjusted to the restructurings of the past year, companies are taking the opportunity to review their release, deployment and configuration processes. By identifying and adopting new approaches and technologies to minimize manual interventions and eliminate error-prone handover moments, businesses are looking to structurally improve their Configuration Management practice in both the short- and long-term.

In short, automation and integration will play a major role in 2011.

One example of this is the continued adoption of virtualization for server and middleware provisioning. This has dramatically reduced the time middleware experts and operations personnel need to spend installing and configuring machines, especially in a "self-service" format that allows developers and other users to set up their own environments.

While the challenges surrounding the resulting potential "virtual sprawl" are now being recognized and addressed by "limited lease" and other mechanisms, on-demand provisioning has quickly highlighted another major bottleneck: being able to spin up a couple of application servers in a matter of minutes is great, of course, but most users – developers, testers, Q&A, and, naturally, end users – need a running application to work with. If you can have a running server in minutes but then still need hours or days to get the application fully deployed and running, there's still room for improvement.

Many companies are thus looking to integrate self-service provisioning with automated deployments, giving them the ability to go from on-demand servers to on-demand applications.

While examining processes and technologies that will help deliver on-demand applications, businesses are also increasingly looking for the ability to support a flexible set of target platforms. On the one hand, production and other "late-stage" environments have seen significant consolidation: very few people are still looking to run both WebSphere and WebLogic, for instance. On the other hand, efficiency drivers and ease-of-use considerations have prompted many to consider "lightweight" alternatives to their production appservers for development and testing.

Previously, the difficulties and cost of supporting a manual process or home-grown automation solution across platforms have generally outweighed any potential savings. However, the emergence of a number of deployment automation solutions that support multiple platforms has changed this. Existing tools that support fine-grained configuration management of different platforms also helps here.

Taken together, they give companies additional options in choosing a combination of target platforms that can balance functionality, performance and cost requirements, as well as avoiding vendor lock-in by making it easier to migrate between platforms.

It's not just within Configuration Management that companies are striving for improved efficiency, though. A major lesson of the past 12 to 24 months has been that, in challenging economic times, companies that can convert ideas into production code quickly have a crucial competitive advantage. Focusing on core activities and streamlining the entire software production chain, from source code to running applications, is key to achieving this.

Agile approaches, now widely adopted across the industry, aim to enable software development to rapidly and continuously deliver desired features. In terms of delivering actual business value, however, we need to look a step further and examine how these iterative releases can be efficiently and continuously tested, verified and deployed. Until then, all we’re actually ending up with is a continuous stream of application builds sitting in a repository.

The upcoming DevOps movement aims to apply many important agile and lean concepts to the whole software production chain, and the growing interest in such approaches reflects the increased awareness of the need for a more holistic, integrated perspective. People should expect awareness of DevOps concepts to spread significantly this year.

Since Configuration Management affects so many elements of the software production chain, CM practitioners will play a major role in examining and applying such concepts and helping companies deliver business value quickly and reliably.

So what does 2011 have in store for Configuration Management professionals? We'll see an increased focus on a broader perspective, identifying inefficiencies and handover moments across the entire release, configuration, deployment and management space. We'll be asked to examine processes and technologies that touch Configuration Management, looking for integration points and "self-service" possibilities.

We'll have to work hard to learn how to integrate new solutions into existing, get new technologies to work, and evaluate what’s ultimately best for each scenario. We'll also have the chance to learn about new fields and practices, and to take a step back and see CM in the wider context of software production as a whole.

In short, a busy, challenging, instructive and horizon-expanding year lies ahead. Here's to 2011!

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