configurationheavy

Configurationheavy is an adjective used in software engineering to describe systems, components, or tools that rely extensively on external configuration to determine their behavior, rather than on hard-coded defaults. In such systems, the majority of features, integrations, and environment-specific settings are defined in configuration files, templates, or environment variables.

Characteristics include large configuration surfaces, modular or layered config, strong dependence on schemas and validation, templating, overrides for environments, and conditional activation of features via config flags.

Advantages: flexibility, portability across environments, easier experimentation without code changes, easier customization for operators. It can support multi-tenancy and rapid adaptation to changing requirements.

Disadvantages: higher learning curve, increased risk of misconfiguration, maintenance burden, potential for configuration drift, longer bootstrap times, debugging can be harder.

Mitigation: provide sensible defaults; adopt convention over configuration; use modular, overridable configurations; enforce schema validation and linting; use templating with clear documentation; employ feature flags; automate drift detection and configuration testing.

Common domains: infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible), container orchestration (Kubernetes manifests, Helm), cloud services with JSON/YAML configs; note that many frameworks offer both conventions and configuration hooks; the term is used to discuss trade-offs rather than a strict metric.