Infrastructure as Code
(IaC)

Jennifer Strejevitch jenniferstrej@gmail.com

IaC enables you to

• Treat infrastructure as Software
• Quickly re-provision any 'broken' resource (crashed server, etc.)
• Scale up and down your infrastructure through Cloud providers
• Spin up/down an exact replica stack for testing

Popular tools that helps us achieve that

• Terraform
• Kubernetes cluster management tools (kops, tectonic) - if you're using docker
• Configuration Management tools (ansible, saltstack)

Pros

• Supported by many providers
• Friendly JSON configuration interface
• Preview of changes
• Versioned infrastructure
• Quick to learn and produce something

Cons

• a bit hard to debug when trying to refactor as it gets more complex
• error messages can be difficult to interpret
• still version 0.x.x

Terraform

kops (Kubernetes)

• Automates the provisioning of Kubernetes clusters (AWS & GCE only)
• Pretty simple to make it highly available
• Needs a lot of fiddling around to get the config right

CM tools

Although a lot of the job once done by Configuration Management tools is being better handled with IaC tools, they are still one of the best option for gluing things together

Permissions

Network

Databases

Servers

Clusters

(Container) scheduling

Load Balancers

Package installation

Configuration files

Environment variables

Iac Provisioning

Configuration Management

Containers

Quick demo

• Containerised Node app
• Use terraform to create a user for kops with required permissions
• Use kops to create a k8s cluster
• Deploy the application to k8s
• Expose it to world through a LB
• Associate DNS name to LB
• Destroy everything