Configuration Management and Desired State Questions

Configuration Management and Desired State focuses on ensuring systems remain in a known, consistent state across fleets and environments. Candidates should understand desired state configuration, idempotent operations, differences between declarative and imperative approaches, templating and variable management, configuration versioning, change control, validation and rollback strategies, drift detection and automated remediation, handling environment specific configuration, and the interaction between configuration management and operational concerns such as autoscaling. This topic also covers managing test environment configurations and using platform specific configuration systems such as Group Policy to apply and troubleshoot system settings at scale.