Configuration Management and Configuration-as-Code(CaC) are pivotal concepts in modern software development. At Ant Group, as the product development

Configuration Management at Ant Group: Generated Manifest & Immutable Desired State

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2025-01-23 00:00:11

Configuration Management and Configuration-as-Code(CaC) are pivotal concepts in modern software development. At Ant Group, as the product development and operations scale, and business portfolio diversifies, the demands for rapid iteration and stringent regulatory compliance present substantial challenges to effective configuration management.

This series of articles is dedicated to exploring the intricacies of configuration management at Ant Group, walking through challenges and solutions in detail, discussing architectures, proposing best practices that have proven effective in production at massive scale, and looking ahead into the future of configuration management.

In this first article, we will examine the specific challenges we encountered over the years, the strategies we devised to address them, and the resulting patterns that have emerged as what we believe to be best practices — Generated Manifest & Immutable Desired State. Through this exploration, we aim to provide valuable insights and practical guidance for navigating the complexities of configuration management in a dynamic and highly regulated environment.

The inherent intricacy of the Kubernetes ecosystem is a reality that developers face from Day 1 and continues to evolve as the product matures. Ant Group runs over 90% of the workload on Kubernetes, which means this complexity is passively falling upon all the developers. This complexity is compounded by the myriad of operational considerations, including the cross-region or multi-cluster setups, resource allocations, networking configurations and such, all of which demand considerable amount of attention.