This document discusses the continuous delivery of infrastructure at a growing startup. It describes how the company automated: 1) Server configuration management using tools like Chef 2) Operating system installation using tools like Foreman 3) Hardware management and availability using tools like Collins This allowed the company to rapidly provision new servers, both physical and virtual, and keep infrastructure in a consistent, desired state using an infrastructure-as-code approach.

1. Continuous Delivery of
Infrastructure
The case of the growing startup

2. Nicolas Blanc - BlaBlArchitect
SinfomicSinfomic
(1999)
@thewhitegeek
(2001)
(2005)
(2008)
(2012)

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Summary
● Introduction
● Why Continuous Delivery of Infrastructure
● Automate Configuration
● Hardware Industrialization
● Automate OS Install
● Hardware availability
● Continuous delivery

4. Introduction

5. 80€
20€
20€
20€
@BlaBlaCar_FR
20€
Trusted Ridesharing

6. People Powered Travel
A travel
search
engine
A trusted
community
@BlaBlaCar_FR

7. Fast growth
@BlaBlaCar_FR

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Why Infrastructure Automation ?

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Few numbers of BlaBlaCar today
2 Data Centers in Paris
● 242 servers
● 109 virtual servers (VMWare)
● 110 EC2 instances during working day
– 20 instances the rest of the time

10. Our Continuous Delivery at the top.
Jealous from the development team !

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We have a strong agility culture
● Push our main app on production 10x a day
● Developers make the push themselves
● App can be pushed only after a Bamboo's merge
● Bamboo merge only after thousands of tests

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tools to manage them all

13. Old Infrastructure Overview

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Physical Server
● 3 racks on a single DC
● 12 servers per rack
● More than 20 differents
hardware configurations

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Cloud (Amazon EC2)
● Only 10 to 20 instances always running
● Used for elasticity
● 10 to 20 instances running for test (Bamboo)

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Network
● Strong Team who designed a
very strong network
– Rémi (@shtouff)
● Not a problem for us to scale
the network

17. Automate the Configuration

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Choosing the right tool

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Improve our Service Deployment
● Started to work on a front web server
– Ease configuration deployment
– Ease a new installation
● Then worked on all servers
– First just for configuration
– Then all service deployment

20. Hardware Industrialization

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Haute Couture
● Before our automation process:
– One server configuration by service
– Multiple services

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Haute Couture - Caveats
● Tailored server are complicated to design
● Hard to upgrade

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Next Step - Virtualization
● Create a virtualization platform
– 4 big servers
– A big disk array

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Virtualization - Caveats
● I/Os Performances compare to physical server
● Network Performances

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Cloud: Why on premise in 2015 ?
● Data privacy concerns
● Limited elasticity required
● Cost efficiency
● History & Culture

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Now – Standard Servers
● Define a single 1U server
– Dual-CPU (12 cores)
– 128 Go of RAM
– Disk configuration vary on 3 flavors:
● Only 2 SSD mirrored (RAID)
● Fast disk (SSD) needed
● Very big capacity (lot of disks)

27. Automate OS Installation

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Automate debian installation
● All our infra is debian based
● PXE
● ipmi
● preseed
– (thx to @jbfavre)

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Virtualization => Template
● Work well on EC2 (only option for instance
install)
● Never used in VMWare
– Same install as physical server debian based
(thanks to Chef)

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Define our needs to choose a tool
● IP allocation
● Bootstrap chef-client
● PXE preseed debian
● Can install either a physical, virtual or cloud server
● Configure the BMC interface
– HP (iLo)
– Dell (DRAC)
– SuperMicro

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● Because Simon (@s_ourea) chose it !
– More likely to be maintained
– Big community
● Fits our needs

32. Hardware Availability

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We need more
● Chef / Foreman, great tools to:
– Install OS
– Install all services and configure them
● No easy solution when you need a specific
hardware on never used server

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Collins !
● Nice tool to manage our hardware inventory.
● A lot of good reasons to choose it:
– Simon (@s_ourea) chose it
– Fit our needs
● Linked with
Foreman

35. Hey ? What about the initial setup of
a physical server ?

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Install servers into DC
● Limited added value in the team racking servers
● Time consuming
● DCs can be far away
● Simon(@s_ourea) & Rémi(@shtouff) pushed a new idea
– Buy servers only when we can use a full rack
– Write an installation documentation
– Choose a company to rack

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Our procedure to have a new rack
● Buy a new rack into the DC
● Our network team installs 2 switchs in the rack.
● They add links to our core network equipments
● Hey! Let's ask to our provider to rack and setup all
servers, following Simon's documentation

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The typical life of a server
● Discovery, and go into Collins
● Another team takes it and installs it via Foreman
● Chef is called via Foreman
● Chef is always running

39. Tests, and Continuous delivery
really ?

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Chef and tests
● Yes, we test all of our
infrastructure's services !
● Thanks to Chef and all of it's community:
KitchenCI + vagrant + serverspec, chefspec

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Chef - Cookbook life
● Each cookbook in it's own git repository
● First test and merge with Bamboo
● Push in production with a new version number
● All servers converge to the desired state

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What do you test ?
● Everything! (one day perhaps)
– Server install
– Bootstrapping
– Convergence
– Clustering /! (not automatic)
– Version upgrade ( one day !)
– Coffee quality

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Continuous delivery, really ?
● New cookbook versions pushed 10x times / day
● Provision several new servers / VM / instances by
day
● Buy a rack full of servers, and install them in less
than a day

44. So cool ! But...
What will you do in the future ?

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Container
CoreOS

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What we will continue to do
● Test our infra (with or without container)
● Industrialize our processes
● Spread knowledge to all other teams
● Dream solutions, and finally build them
● Listen to Simon (@s_ourea)

47. Conclusion

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What to keep in mind
● Involve overall company
● Support company growth
● Don't get attached to tools
● Keep a “small team” spirit

49. That's all folks!
Thanks you!
Nicolas Blanc
(@thewhitegeek)