Introduce to Infrastructure as Code approach

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INFRASTRUCTURE AS
CODE AND SERVICE

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What is infrastructure?
• Bare-Metal
• Host OS
• Services
• Applica:ons
• Environments
• Se=ngs
• Storage (Data)
• Network

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NO MANUAL CONFIGURATION!!!
…unless you are alone at the Company

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Choose your language
• Language to describe your infrastructure
– Puppet
– Chef
– Salt
– Ansible

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VCS (GIT)
• It brings a traceability for any change
– Who?
– Why?
– When?
• Easy rollbacks
– It fails? -> Rollback to the working version
• Every change in infrastructure must be
commiUed
– If not – it has not happened!

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Find traces!

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Readable and documented

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Templates

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ANTIPATTERN: Golden Image
• Manually craXed infrastructure server (image/
virtual) and nobody (even creator aXer some
:me) know how to change it.
• Use containers (Hi, Docker!)
– Reproductable
– Described in code

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ANTIPATTERN:
Copy and paste files
• Let’s copy bunch of files from one server to
another!
NO!
• DriX!
• No traces
• Configura:on’s are different
• Do it incremental

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App configura:on
• Use templates
• Use configura:on discovery and define keys in
app instead of values
• Consul again

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Secrets
• We shouldn’t store any passwords in code
• Inject it on the very last stage of deployment
• How?
– Special DB (Consul?)
– Encrypt it and decrypt on targets (one file + git-
crypt with GPG)

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Approaches
• Each environment is a branch
• Single master and feature-branches

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Tes:ng
• Ansible-lint and syntax check
• Integra:on tests before we deploy
infrastructure (kitchen.ci + BATS)

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Workflow

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Benefits
• Immutability
• No need to backup everything (backup DATA only)
• Disaster recovery
• It’s reusable
• It’s automated
• It’s predictable and consistent
• … and it’s by accident already documented
• Person-independent
• Spare our :me for more interes:ng things
• Side-benefit: as admins are working with code now, they
have a beUer understanding about processes in dev

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Problems
• Bad configura:ons can be applied on all the
servers (tests!)
• Configura:ons driX (but as a result of bad
discipline)
• The main approach of administra:ng servers
changes
• It’s really hard to change our habits
• … and this is the main problem
• ... but we can try!

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What about us?
• We’ve already some roles and configura:ons
described in code and we use them
• Our deploy (hi, EDU!) is based on code
• The goal is to write whole infrastructure in
code
• We need to solve password problem
• We need to create integra:on tests and test
beUer

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Links…
• hUp://radar.oreilly.com/2015/06/an-
introduc:on-to-immutable-infrastructure.html
• hUp://kief.com/configura:on-driX.html
• hUp://mar:nfowler.com/bliki/
SnowflakeServer.html
• hUps://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/
infrastructure-code-reason-smile
• hUp://mar:nfowler.com/bliki/
BlueGreenDeployment.html