Distributed computing systems and/or computer networks, used by businesses or other organizations, may include tens or hundreds of computers. For example, a distributed system may include a number of computing devices (referred to herein as computing nodes), each of which may host one or more processes. A hosted process, as described herein, may be a lightweight virtual machine (VM) that allows code to run in isolation from other hosted processes but safely share the resources of the computing node. Managing such a computing system may include defining the role of each computer/process, defining the software that is to be implemented at the hosted nodes in the computing system, defining the connections between the computing nodes, etc.
Operators (i.e., developers or technicians), when configuring a distributed computing system, may generate configuration files for each hosted process in the distributed system. Each configuration file may define the initialization (e.g., the boot-up process) for a particular hosted process in the distributed system. For a complex distributed system, multiple operators may be responsible for managing the distributed system and may thus each work on the configuration files.