When you start developing a cardinal rule is to make your environment as close to the production environment as possible. As our sites get more complicated that becomes more complicated. It's no longer just Apache, MySQL and PHP. Now there's nginx, HHVM, PostgreSQL, Apache Solr, memcached, Varnish ... just to name a few. And if you support your sites after they launch the site you're working on today may be completely different than tomorrow. You need some way of having confidence that the software you're working on now will work tomorrow or next week on another machine. And since very few of us have a pet system administrator to do all that for us, we need to turn to software.

Topics we'll discuss:

Various configuration management tools
How they can fit into your process
Example configurations that you can apply today