War Story: The day I nearly invented server management

Long before I knew about puppet (or heard about chef via vagrant), I was working on a system with around 100 virtual hosts, nearly all of them configured from a small pool of standard features.  This made for a long, complicated vhosts.conf file, which we managed by keeping it in alphabetical order and using search a lot.  I realized that a lot of the duplication could be removed by generating it from a template file.

Perfectly Flexible

Sometimes, a stakeholder doesn't like the idea of requiring a Programmer to make lengthy changes to a project's code if the requirements were to change at some future date. The proposed solution is always simple: The System just needs to be more flexible.

Having been the unsuspecting Programmer on a couple of these projects, I can report that the simple solution does not work.