Engineering · Software Engineering (Applied)
A topic within Software Engineering (Applied), itself one of 12 topics in that field and part of Engineering.
2 works
Chad Fowler
Argues a server should never be patched or reconfigured in place, only ever replaced wholesale from a known-good image, because a long-lived server accumulates undocumented state that no one can reason about.
Martin Fowler
Argues that once server configuration is expressed as version-controlled code rather than manual steps, the whole discipline of testing, review and reproducibility that software already has can be applied to infrastructure.
link checked 17 Sept 2026