Many teams adopting Infrastructure as Code end up with monolithic infrastructure. But many of the principles for microservices software architecture apply just as well to infrastructure: small, focused capabilities that can be delivered independently. This talk explores how team structures and microservices principles apply to infrastructure, and describes some patterns and anti-patterns. These are applicable whatever tools are used, whether it's Terraform, CloudFormation, Puppet, Chef, Ansible, or others. It also applies to all infrastructure platforms, whether it's an IaaS cloud like AWS or OpenStack, a virtualized platform, or even physical hardware.

1. @kief
Infrastructure
as
MICROSERVICES
#OReillySACon

2. kief@thoughtworks.com
Cloud Practice Lead (UK)
DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Agile Ops
Twitter: @kief
Book: http://oreil.ly/1JKIBVe
Site: http://infrastructure-as-code.com
October 2016

3. The
MONOLITHIC
infrastructure

4. THE INFRASTRUCTURE
Microservices
Infrastructure

5. Fragile: Easy to break something
Effort: Changes require too much time and effort
Snowflakes: Can’t reliably rebuild it
Testing: Difficult to write automated tests
PROBLEMS

6. MICROSERVICES!
Ease of Change
Resilience
Replaceability
Scaling
Composability

7. THINGS TO
THINK
ABOUT
■ Teams ■ Capabilities ■ Design

8. TEAMS

9. HOW ARE YOUR DEV & OPS
TEAMS ORGANIZED?

10. SEPARATE DEV & OPS GROUPS?

11. FULLY CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS?

12. DEV, OPS, AND DEVOPS?

13. Challenges with
Cross-Functional
Teams

14. DISPERSAL OF DEEP EXPERTISE

15. DUPLICATED EFFORT

16. LACK OF OWNERSHIP

17. CONFLICTING PRIORITIES

18. MONOLITHIC INFRASTRUCTURE TEAM ...
Multiple
Microservice
Teams
Single [Infrastructure] Team

19. “Organizations which design
systems are constrained to
produce designs which are copies
of the communication structures
of these organizations.”
CONWAY’S LAW

20. Design your team structures and
technical architectures together
INVERSE CONWAY MANEUVER
ThoughtWorks Radar: http://thght.works/2dpXEJv

21. OPS SERVICE TEAMS
Organized around capabilities
Enable other teams
“You build it, you run it”

22. CAPABILITIES

23. What services
does your
infrastructure
need to
provide?
● Servers
● Networking
● Storage
● Monitoring
● Deployment
● Security
● Databases

24. CHARACTERISTIC OF MICROSERVICE DESIGN
Independently deployable elements
Organized around business capabilities
Delivered as products not projects
With decentralized governance
Designed for failure
With an evolving design
http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

25. PROVIDING CAPABILITIES
Guidance
Examples
Tools
Services

26. Define and manage your platform by:
● Identifying your users
● Identifying their goals
● Defining tasks
● Organizing tasks to achieve outcomes
http://jpattonassociates.com/user-story-mapping/
STORY MAPPING / CAPABILITY MAPPING

27. DESIGN

28. How are your
infrastructure
files currently
organized?
● One big file?
● Modules?
● Other?

29. DESIGN CHALLENGE
How can we design loosely
coupled infrastructure so that we
can make changes routinely,
easily, and safely?

30. EXAMPLE
INFRASTRUCTURE
Catalog DB User DB
Viewer Service Editor Service
Catalog Service User ServiceVendor Service
ELB
Monitoring
Service
ELB
Security Group

31. Catalog DB User DB
Viewer Service Editor Service
Catalog Service User ServiceVendor Service
ELB
Monitoring
Service
MONOLITHIC
STACK ELB
Security Group

32. MODULAR
INFRASTRUCTURE
ELB Definition Module
Modularity is helpful for sharing and reusing code

33. MODULAR
INFRASTRUCTURE
Shared ELB
Definition Module
Modularity can actually make change more risky
Multiple stacks import the module

34. HORIZONTAL
STACKS

35. MICRO-SERVICE
STACKS
Infrastructure Stack
for the Viewer Service
● Load Balancer VIP
● Firewall Rule
● Web Server Vhost
● App Server Cluster
Infrastructure Stack
for the User Service
● Load Balancer VIP
● Firewall Rules
● App Server Cluster
● Database Instance

36. SHARED
STACKS
Shared Networking
Infrastructure Stack
● Subnets
● Firewall Rules
User Service
Infrastructure Stack
● Load Balancer VIP
● App Server Cluster
● Database Instance

37. SHARED
STACKS
Configuration Registry
app_server_subnet_id=sn-1234abcd
https_port_allow_rule=sg-dcba4321
Shared
Networking
User Service

38. A FEW THOUGHTS
Align infrastructure stacks according to the scope of
change
Use delivery pipelines to test changes to infrastructure
elements

39. Book: http://oreil.ly/1JKIBVe
Site: http://infrastructure-as-code.com
Twitter: @kief
kief@thoughtworks.com
Cloud Practice Lead (UK)
DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Agile Ops