Infrastructure as Code
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The document discusses treating infrastructure as code by building pipelines that are testable, repeatable, destroyable, and reviewable. This involves using a toolchain to manage infrastructure in a way that addresses the problems of complexity, fragility, and misalignment that currently exist. The goal is to provide a solution and vision for more effectively developing and managing infrastructure.
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Infrastructure as Code
- 1. I N F R A S T R U C T U R E A S C O D E Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 2. B A C K G R O U N D Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 3. T H E P R O B L E M Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 4. C O M P L E X I T Y Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 5. F R A G I L I T Y Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 6. M I S A L I G N M E N T Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 7. A S O L U T I O N ? Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 8. B U I L D P I P E L I N E S Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 9. W H Y ? Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 10. T E S TA B L E Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 11. R E P E ATA B L E Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 12. D E S T R O YA B L E Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 13. R E V I E WA B L E Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 14. D E V O P S Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 15. V I S I O N Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 16. C L A R I F I C AT I O N S Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 17. H O W ? Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 18. T O O L C H A I N Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 19. W H AT ’ S N E X T ? Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
- 20. Q U E S T I O N S ? Shaw Innes - web: shawinnes.com - twitter: @ShawInnes
Editor's Notes
- infrastructure as code is a means to solve a number of the problems of configuration management of medium to large scale data centres however the principles can be applied to any system management challenge
- about me devops engineer continuous delivery team - enabling CD, not doing CD which is used to help champion a DevOps movement and culture within the company
- continuous delivery is improving the application build and deployment process, but not the whole ecosystem as a result, the increased frequency of application deployments is placing more strain on infrastructure and current infrastructure configuration management is mostly manual as a side-effect of long-lived environments there are lots of point-solutions, firefighting and patching which results in machines and environments which are all a little different, like snowflakes
- long-lived enterprise networks and application architectures can become extremely complex especially in environments where they grow as a result of a number of mergers and acquisitions
- with this complexity comes fragility and making changes to any part of the systems can result in unforeseen side-effects this reduces peoples’ willingness to make small improvements which means the whole system slowly drifts into a state of disrepair
- when there are manually deployed applications or manually maintained infrastructure, generally there will become a lack of consistency between development, test and production environments there will also be a mismatch between the cadence of updates to application software and the underlying systems upon which they rely. this will result in unforeseen problems when attempting to make changes to the systems.
- based on looking at what operators of large data centres are doing the following solution is one possible way to manage the deployment and configuration of: developer pc, single servers, multiple servers, full stack environments, production multiple operating systems with less reliance on vendor-provided solutions physical machines, virtual machines, on-premises and cloud environments
- the idea is to create build “pipelines” by automating processes we can build a chain of dependent steps which result in reliable infrastructure builds the build pipelines will be driven by version controlled source code and configurations
- but you might ask why are build pipelines the answer? there are a number of compelling reasons an amusing one which I heard was “because you can’t deploy visio diagrams to production”…
- by using practices commonly used in software development such as “test driven development” (TDD) we can define what our environment configuration should look like and then perform automated tests to ensure that our code and configuration will actually result in the correct output
- just as continuous integration provides software developers with an easily repeatable process to build and test their software we can apply this to infrastructure and by repeating the process you are able to incrementally improve each time
- one of the main reasons why environments become unmanageable is because they are long-lived the more time between creation and destruction, the more time you are allowing for configuration-drift and long-lived environments encourage patching and modification which eventually results in configuration drift but if you make it so easy to recreate them that you can routinely destroy them then you avoid this problem
- another other challenge with complex environments is change control and auditability if your infrastructure configuration is contained in source control it’s very easy for upcoming changes to be reviewed and audited and these practices can be built into the pipeline
- if you build a pipeline where the infrastructure code is shared between the development team and infrastructure or operations team you create more of a DevOps culture by giving the teams a shared goal and shared responsibility
- the vision is to create the ability to use a consistent, automated, version controlled system to build and maintain development, test and production environments. the pipeline to build, test and deploy infrastructure should be very similar to those used by software teams for the delivery of applications, and in fact it’s very likely that both pipelines will eventually merge into one developing a DevOps culture and using a small collection of tools we can make the solution agnostic to hosting strategy (either on-premises or cloud), and all the way from a single server up to a full-stack environment
- there are a few assumptions about infrastructure as code or “programmable infrastructure” which should be clarified: it’s not about just automatically firing up virtual machines it doesn’t replace continuous delivery, but rather provides a stable platform to enable it it should be done in such a way so as to allow as much re-use of code from development all the way through to production the same patterns should be applicable from a single machine all the way to a full-stack environment you don’t need to have the full picture to get immediate benefit, starting with a way to configure developer workstations would save new developers a couple of days
- so how do we do this? similar to the processes we have begun for transforming our software delivery processes through continuous delivery we will develop the patterns and practices to enable continuous delivery of infrastructure components this will be done using a combination of existing tools and a number of industry-accepted opensource and commercial products
- github for source control chef for configuration management and automation packer for building machine images vagrant for development of infrastructure code vmware for on-premises virtualisation teamcity for build automation and pipeline execution octopus deploy for application configuration and deployment
- so what’s next? learn about configuration management tools to configure individual machines or servers research what other businesses are doing to solve these challenges start an infrastructure as code project to bootstrap the building of an infrastructure delivery pipeline combine the power of infrastructure automation with the existing benefits being realised by continuous delivery projects
- if you have any questions please feel free to contact me through email, website or via twitter