Configuration Management

Overview

The Configuration Management document outlines the strategies, patterns, and tools used for managing configurations across different environments within the Engineering AI Agent system. This document details configuration sources, hierarchy, security practices, and runtime management for service configurations.

Key Components

Configuration Sources

The system uses a layered approach to configuration management, prioritizing sources in the following order:

Environment Variables: For runtime overrides and secrets
Kubernetes ConfigMaps/Secrets: For container-specific configuration
Configuration Server: For centralized, dynamic configuration
Local Files: For default values and development use

Configuration Hierarchy

Secrets Management

Secrets are managed separately from regular configuration
Encryption at rest and in transit is enforced
Just-in-time access with short-lived credentials
Access is audited and logged

Dynamic Configuration

The system supports dynamic configuration changes without service restarts:

class ConfigListener:
    def __init__(self, config_service_url, service_name):
        self.config_service_url = config_service_url
        self.service_name = service_name
        self.callbacks = {}
        self.start_listening()
    
    def register_callback(self, config_key, callback_fn):
        """Register a function to be called when a config value changes"""
        self.callbacks[config_key] = callback_fn
    
    def handle_config_change(self, config_key, new_value):
        """Called when a configuration change is detected"""
        if config_key in self.callbacks:
            self.callbacks[config_key](new_value)
    
    def start_listening(self):
        """Start listening for configuration changes"""
        # Implementation for establishing connection to config service
        pass

Configuration Schema

Each service defines its configuration schema, which includes:

Required and optional parameters
Type information and validation rules
Default values
Documentation
Security classification

Example schema definition:

service: knowledge-base
version: 1.0
parameters:
  - name: database_url
    type: string
    required: true
    secret: true
    description: "Connection string for the database"
    validation: "^(postgresql|mysql)://.*$"
  
  - name: vector_dimension
    type: integer
    required: false
    default: 1536
    description: "Dimension size for vector embeddings"
    validation: "^[0-9]{3,4}$"
  
  - name: cache_ttl_seconds
    type: integer
    required: false
    default: 3600
    description: "Time-to-live for cache entries in seconds"
    validation: "^[0-9]{1,5}$"