Luis Atencio has continued his series on continuous delivery with this second post. It focuses on the first step (and one of the most important) - keeping everything configuration-related in a version control system.

I will be continuing the topic on Continuous Delivery which began in my previous post: Notes on Continuous Integration; this time we will start looking at the first and most important step, Configuration Management. In the words of the authors (resource below): Configuration Management refers to the process by which all artifacts ... and the relationships between them, are stored, retrieved, uniquely identified, and modified.

He sets out four principles that can be used to set this process up in your workflow:

• Keep everything in version control
• Manage dependencies
• Manage software configuration
• Manage environments

Each point has an explanation and advice on what he's found the best way to implement the functionality. He finishes with a few other pieces of advice including avoiding branching in config repositories and having good communication practices with your ops team.