Someone in the CFEngine community said that configuration management is a big hammer: you can manage a zillion of systems with ease. Or wreck them, with the same ease. Deploying configuration changes is a risky business. It takes responsibility. And testing, lots of testing.

The biggest shops in town™ have wonderful continuous integration systems, where every commit spawns a number of virtual machines where the changes are tested and won’t make it into the master branch unless they work correctly. In smaller shops most of the testing phase is done by hand, and it’s absolutely key to have the ability to destroy or create VMs in a snap, well configured and with all the necessary software already on board. We are that kind of small shop, we made that kind of system and we did it on the cheap. If you want to buy yourself one, just read on.

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