I'm trying to understand the difference between managing configuration files for the purposes of simplifying automated deployment.

We have 5 environments to build. So far 2 have been built with no versioning at all. Right now we're using Artifactory to "manage" the rpm files. I've been tasked to "version control the other stuff". Right now, other stuff means a couple of properties files.

My question is, if I were to simply "version control the other stuff", I would store the properties files in Github, I'd then have Jenkins "build" then "deploy" it to Artifactory? Isn't it extremely difficult to manage infrastructure versioning without infrastructure as code?

My second question is, since our goals are to simplify automated deployment, shouldn't we be using Ansible (or puppet or chef but I like ansible). We could then store Ansible playbooks (and cloudformation templates, etc.) in Github. In this case, what binaries would there be to version?