Simone Soldateschi discusses immutable infrastructure systems in AWS. He advocates for baking application deployments into AMIs for simplicity and repeatability. This avoids complicated configuration management and allows deploying pre-tested environments. He demonstrates a process for baking AMIs, including starting a vanilla EC2 instance, configuring and deploying an app, exporting the result as a new AMI, then discarding the instance. This produces immutable, versioned environments that are easy to deploy and maintain across environments.

1. Immutable Systems
in AWS Cloud
by Simone Soldateschi
@soldasimo
20160423
[https://goo.gl/XFae40]

2. “Let me tell you a story...”

3. Who I am
● Senior Service Engineer at Microsoft
● 13 years of experience as
○ Software Engineer
○ Systems Engineer
○ been DevOps'in for the last ~9 years
Simone Soldateschi
@soldasimo
simone.soldateschi@gmail.com
Saturday: 5.15pm-6.30pm
+ break time

4. ● Configuration Management, a bit
● Containers/Microservices, ...you sure?
● Orchestration, defo
● CI/CD, abs
Outline

5. Why

8. “Meta” infrastucture

10. Complicated Vs Complex

11. ● Simple
● Repeatable
● Versioned
Things should be

12. BAU

15. “The Truth lies somewhere in the
middle”

16. Possible solution

18. Start with
vanilla image
Customise
&
install app
Test
store
version
re-use

19. “What’s missing can’t break”
-- Henry Ford (maybe)

20. Trivial Issue

21. Trivial Issue
foo-1.2.3.pkg
foo-1.2.1.pkg
that’s an issue

22. Trivial Issue
foo-1.2.1.pkg
foo-1.2.1.pkg
that’s another issue

23. How to solve it
// aim for simplicity

25. Bake it

26. Spin EC2 up based off AMI

27. Service Discovery

28. Update strategy
Programmatically Just in time

29. Implementation
// wait for it...

30. Bake it
● Spin vanilla EC2 up
● Configure & Deploy app
● Export AMI
● Tear-down
See: bake-aws-ami on GitHub

31. Spin vanilla EC2 up

32. Configuration & Deployment

33. Create AMI & Tear-down

34. CI/CD Workflow
DEV UAT PPE PROD
?? ?

35. Recap

36. runbook
DEV
STG
PROD

37. Lesson Learned
● Horses for courses K.I.S.S.
● use right CfgMgmt/CI/CD right repeatable
● version, test, drop/promote it’s easy!
«All Configuration Management Systems suck,
Ansible just sucks less»

39. simone soldateschi
Saturday: 5.15pm-6.30pm
+ break time
@soldasimo
simone.soldateschi@gmail.com