The document discusses the importance of effective self-service infrastructure and highlights the need for comprehensive documentation to enhance user confidence and usability. It emphasizes automation, familiarity, and simplicity in operations while detailing traditional provisioning processes and recommending stateful sets for deployments. The author advocates for clear communication and user feedback to improve infrastructure management at Squarespace.

1. Self-Service Infrastructure is Useless
if No One Knows How to Use It
Kevin Lynch
klynch@squarespace.com

2. ● User submits a ticket
● Wait hours/days/weeks
● ...
● Profit?

3. ● Waste of time
● Error prone
● Lack of user confidence

4. What is self-service infrastructure?

5. ● Automated
● Repeatable
● Fast
● Understandable

6. How do we get there?

8. ● Containers are cool!
● Amazing documentation
● Great fundamentals
○ Ephemeral Pods
○ Scalable Deployments
○ These things called StatefulSets

9. “Containers are cool!”
“How do I use this thing?”
“Is it reliable?”

10. Documentation!
Documentation!
Documentation!

11. ● Everyone learns differently
○ Wiki docs
○ FAQs
○ Live Training Sessions
○ Recorded Sessions
○ Self-paced Labs

12. “Help! I’m trying to use super
alpha feature X and it’s not
working!”
“Can I put my database in
Kubernetes?”

13. ● Persistence in Kubernetes is hard, so maybe
don’t do it yet?
● Only promise what you can support
○ Don’t just say no. Be clear why.
○ Builds trust with users
Clearly define expectations

14. “Okay! How do I create a VM
for my database?”

15. Traditional Provisioning Process
Provision
Find Resources
(CPU, RAM, Disk)
Assign IP
Configure VLAN
Configure Firewall
Update Ansible
Inventory
DNS Updates
PXE Boot
Install OS
Configure OS
Install App
Dependencies
Install App!
Configure
Monitoring

17. ● Let product engineers focus on the product!
● Hide complexity when possible
● We’re the infrastructure experts
Provide sane defaults

18. apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: StatefulSet
metadata:
name: postgres
spec:
replicas: 2
template:
spec:
containers:
- image: postgres:latest
resources:
requests:
cpu: 8
memory: 16Gi
Provide familiar interfaces
● Answers:
○ What is it?
○ How many?
○ How big?

19. Simple operations
● kubectl scale statefulset postgres --replicas 4

20. apiVersion: vm.squarespace.net/v1
kind: VirtualMachineStatefulSet
metadata:
name: postgres
spec:
type: vmware
replicas: 2
resources:
requests:
cpu: 8
memory: 16Gi
Provide familiar interfaces
● Assumes users:
○ Understand it?
○ Like the interface?
● Get feedback!

21. Simple operations
● vmctl scale statefulset postgres --replicas 4

22. “Give me 10 more web
servers!”
“And a database”
“Oh and replicate it…”

23. QUESTIONS?
Thank you!
squarespace.com/careers
Kevin Lynch
klynch@squarespace.com
@KevML