Infrastructure As Code

2015 Q2 EMC AccreditationJonas Rosland & Matt Cowger

What do we define as infrastructure?

Why define infrastructure as code?• Deploy, monitor and connect together all the pieces

needed to run services for the organization

• Processes and tools for faster end-to-end delivery of quality services

• Automation comes built-in

How do we do this?• Desired state specified in text files

• Autonomic (self-corrects to desired state)

• State should be known through monitoring

• Remove snowflake servers

Why store them in text files?• Easy to read and edit

• Shareable

• Can use standard version control like Git or SVN

• Becomes executable documentation

Simple examplenode 'www2' { class { 'apache': } # use apache module apache::vhost { 'awesomewebsite.com': # define vhost resource port => '80', docroot => '/var/www/html' }}

Change root passworduser { root: ensure => present, password => '$ecretP@ssw0rd',}

Manually configured environments are like a

house of cards in a china shop— Neal Ford

Snowflake serversDeploying, provisioning and scaling automatically is virtually impossible if every server is unique

Adds friction between the requestor and the deployer

Mistakes happenWe're all human

What can happen if you don't treat

infrastructure as code?

Some firms have found that up to 60% of failures are caused by human error, not

hardware failure

Example - Knight Capital Group

Knight Capital Group - What happened?Manual deployment of new trading software

7 of 8 servers correctly updated

Old function still alive on the 8th server led to

$440 million loss in 45 minutes

Treat your infrastructure as code

BenefitsSelf documenting infrastructure

You now have source code for how anything in your datacenter is setup

Executable documentation

Further reading:PuppetLabsVagrantDocker

Infrastructure as Code: A reason to smile