Greetings, My company is migrating off of 4 load balanced Sun web servers and onto 4 load balanced Apache servers. (on Red Hat Linux) At current their solution to manage the Apache web servers is to edit the conf file only using a ton of include statements. To me this seems like a poor solution which will lead to difficulty in supporting the servers without a deep knowledge of how they were developed. My question would be, what are other people using to manage their Apache web servers? Is this a common business practice to manage only through the config file or are there better solutions?
Not to be rude, but your company sounds like they are not working with Enterprise-level administrators. Are there 4 servers for 4 applications, or 4 for just 1? What includes are in the Apache configuration? I personally use NGINX (thus I don't have to manage Apache at all, unless it's a reverse proxy in which case I just add Caching, Compression, and mod_rpaf). Is the current configuration documented? If not, that's your first problem.