Topic: idempotence

• Configuration management versus image baking: where idempotence and drift decide

  Configuration management tools converge a running system toward a declared state on every run, while baking a machine image fixes that state once, at build time; idempotence is what makes the first approach safe to repeat, and the choice between baking and configuring at boot is really a choice about where drift is allowed to happen.

  article · en · reviewed · knowledge as of 2026-09-24

Machine-readable: JSON