Infrastructure as Code fun

7/25/2018 Richard Murphy

Infrastructure-as-code can be a powerful way to build out new environments, spin up and down test environments quickly, and even destroy them, and spin them back up again when needed.  Infrastructure-as-code also makes self service portals for IaaS possible where users can can order up their favorite flavor of virtual machine, and even biggie size it if they wish.  Tools like Terraform, Cloudformation, Chef, Puppet, and Ansible are very powerful tools and all have capabilities to perform these tasks and much more.

Today we are using Ansible to automate the creation of VMware virtual machines and install software on those virtual machines after they have been created.  This demonstrates the simplicity and power of even a simple use case like the one we will show in the video below.

One other concept here is ‘configuration as code’.  Using Gitlab as the backend for configuration files that we deploy using git.  I have used this method in the past for Splunk app configuration files and it worked well as long as you mange the SLC process on the config files like you would any other source code.  Building on this idea, you can wrap up these things in Jenkins jobs and come up with elaborate ways to monitor your configuration drift by diffing the files every so often against the ‘current’ version in Gitlab.  (More on this in the 3rd installment)  You can have rollback jobs if something goes awry, or if one of your sysadmins goes rogue and modifies a file in production… nah… they would never do that, right?