INFRASTRUCTURE AUTOMATION
WITH CHEF & ANSIBLE
Tips & tools for automating your web infrastructure.
Waqar Alamgir @wajrcs
https://github.com/waqar-alamgir/tutorials/tree/master/vagrant-lamp-ansible

Here’s What I’m Going To Talk To You About!
 What is Infrastructure and why you should
automate it?
 Typical Infrastructure
 Benefits
 CMS/ Automation
 Chef / Terminologies / Disadvantages
 Ansible / Disadvantages
 Demo
 Summary
 Questions

Meet this IT GUY & Service Provider

Why you should automate your web
infrastructure
 All of your configuration information is in one
place.
 You can spin up perfectly configured servers
instantly.
 You can change things in one place and have
them propagate through your entire system.
 You can create dev and test environments, that
are exact replicas of your production.

Infrastructure
 A high performance, reliable, and secure
integrated technology infrastructure for managing
multiple hosted applications by Application
Service Providers.
 Application infrastructure, comprised of
application servers, web servers, and often
database servers, is a core component in most
network architectures.

Typical Infrastructure

Benefits
 Technical benefits:
 Continuous software delivery
 Less complex problems to fix
 Faster resolution of problems
 Business benefits:
 Faster delivery of features
 More stable operating environments
 More time available to add value (rather than
fix/maintain)

 PHP
 Nginx
 Redis
 PostgreSQL
 Gearman
My Typical Project

Configuration Management Software
 Ansible
 Chef
 Puppet
 SaltStack
 CFEngine
 Juju
 many others

What is Chef?
“Reality-based automation for the cloud.”
“Infrastructure as Code.”
“A global view of your system as opposed to local
one”

Terminologies
Chef Server?
 Central storage for all your chef config.
 Stores all your git repo stuff as structured data in
json.
 Uses CouchDB for storage and quering
 Hosted Chef free for up to 5 nodes – then you
should host it yourself.

Terminologies
Knife?
Command line tool to interface between your local
code repo and your chef server.

Terminologies
Nodes?
Servers in your system.

Terminologies
Roles?
A nice way of abstracting what a node does and
what should be installed on it. i.e.
 A webserver role
 A database role
Open up firewall for front-end severs.

Terminologies
Cookbooks?
The base unit of configuration, so you would have
a cookbook for nginx, postgres, gunicorn, etc.

Terminologies
Recipes?
A computer program that runs cookbooks
Mostly written in Ruby or Python

Chef Infrastructure

Chef Infrastructure

Chef disadvantages
 You need to know Ruby (infrastructure as code)
 Need to install Chef Client on nodes
 Chef Client can be broken (example, Rubygems
Sandbox in 11/12 versions)
 Different teams with different approaches
 Documentation is not perfect
 Too many tools and options

Who is Using Chef
 Facebook, with over 20K instances
 Yahoo!
 IGN
 Nordstrom
 Dream Host
 Target
 Bloomberg

Ansible
 Runs locally (push model, like Chef Solo)
 Client-less (need only Python)
 YAML configs, "command to infrastructure"
 Huge community
 Ansible Tower for more automation

Ansible Infrastructure

Ansible disadvantages
 Bad team workflow
 Small flexibility in coding
 Poor development testing
 Limited support for Windows
(from 1.7 can use winrm,
but still not perfect and small amount of modules)

Who is Using Ansible
 Twitter
 Apple
 NASA
 CISCO
 Juniper
 HootSuit

Demo Application - LAMP Stack
Provision Theme
 Common system level tools
 MySQL, Memcached, Beanstalk
 Web tools as Apache, PHP

Demo Application - LAMP Stack

Demo Application - LAMP Stack

Demo Application - LAMP Stack

To Sum it all up….
 You should really, really, really use something for
server configuration.
 Chef: Ruby code to infrastructure.
 Ansible: YAML commands to infrastructure, with
no clients.

<Thank You!> Questions?
Contact Information
twitter: @wajrcs
github: https://github.com/waqar-
alamgir/tutorials/tree/master/vagrant-
lamp-ansible