Infrastructure as code

References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Configuration_management
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Version_control
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure_as_code
• GitOps

I don't think it is possible to have a "dev ops" environment without some kind of Configuration Management Tool.
They make it possible to configure an environment through scripts.
The big advantage of a tool like this is that new virtual machine or container instances can be easily created or updated.
The most common solutions here I think are Ansible, Puppet, Chef and Salt.

It is probably best to pick one tool and have practical scripting exercises how to an enviroment can be configured programmatically.

[monperrus]

Hi Göran,

Thanks for your suggestion.

Among Ansible, Puppet, Chef and Salt, what's the one with the best documentation, in particular getting started and tutorials pages to your opinion?

[monperrus]

Terminology: infrastructure as code (IaC) #22

[monperrus]

Reading material:
GitOps: A Path to More Self-Service IT
https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2018/9/230599-gitops/fulltext

"Use Cases for GitOps. DNS is an obvious place to start, as are VM creation, container maintenance and orchestration, firewall rules, website updates, blog posts, email aliases and mailing lists, and just about any virtual infrastructure or one with a configuration file or API."

[MatsJonsson]

We've done this with Ansible and Salt in a couple of big projects, only to end up with huge amounts of stuff just to get the actual stuff working.

Terraform

The move to Terraform and Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) made life a lot easier https://www.terraform.io/.

[bittermandel]

We're running Salt extensively on thousands of nodes. It's working great for us and gives us great power in controlling our "standard" environments

https://saltproject.io/

[alanmcg]

I have seen this implemented with puppet, both badly and very well, in different organisations.

[monperrus]

How good is your puppet? an empirically defined and validated quality model for puppet
https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/files/37386939/how_good_is_your_puppet.pdf

[bbaudry]

Molecule is a tool for testing ansible scripts
https://molecule.readthedocs.io/en/stable/#

[monperrus]

Using Testinfra with Ansible to verify server state
https://opensource.com/article/19/5/using-testinfra-ansible-verify-server-state

[monperrus]

Python library to create AWS CloudFormation descriptions
https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere

[monperrus]

Pulumi - Infrastructure as Code
https://www.pulumi.com/