What is the underlying goal of using the configuration management in DevOps practices?

The underlying goal of using configuration management in DevOps practices primarily revolves around ensuring consistency across environments. This means that configuration management tools help maintain the same configurations for development, testing, and production environments. Through automation, teams can prevent discrepancies that often occur when manual configurations are applied in different environments, leading to potential errors and inconsistencies in how applications behave.

By standardizing configurations and automating the deployment process, development and operations teams can achieve a more reliable and predictable system environment. This consistency not only enhances the software's reliability but also streamlines the overall development and deployment processes, making it easier to replicate environments, troubleshoot issues, and implement updates without unforeseen complications.

While collaboration among teams, tracking project timelines, and minimizing deployment cycles are important aspects of DevOps, they are not the primary focus of configuration management. Instead, these elements are typically facilitated by consistent environments established through effective configuration management practices.