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Nothing preventing you from building a versioned configuration system using a database or similar, especially if you build tools to actually change the configuration rather than hand editing text files.

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The key to this is machine AND human readable formats. That is why the text format of protobufs is such a good approach: - structured formats - declared schema - the parser to read the file is also a validity checker (at least for data types)

There are tools that do similar with JSON but none are as simple and unobtrusive as protobuf tool chain.

Google has this, IIRC it’s called CDPush

CDPush does versioning, canaried rollouts of... hand edited text files.

I believe CDPush still has some latency involved which would be slower than reading raw config data from a DB.

CDPush does the pushing. It's not a database.

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