Depending on the life cycle of the configuration in question, we can rely on our automated configuration systems to ensure consistency (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, Bosh, etc.), use a service mesh or configuration management service to propagate runtime configuration (Istio, AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store etc.), or we can create new virtual machines or containers from our automated build mechanism and deploy them into production, destroying the old ones or taking them out of rotation.§§ The latter pattern is what has become known as immutable infrastructure, where manual changes to
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