Erik is one of the founders of Instruqt, a learning platform for DevOps tooling and Cloud technology. With Instruqt, each participant gets his/her own personal infrastructure, that is being created in seconds. In this talk I will show how we leveraged Terraform, Kubernetes and Google Cloud to create a scalable and cost-effective learning platform. I will discuss the choices we've made, the problems we encountered and the lessons learned.

1. Building a scalable learning platform
“how to make scaling the cloud’s problem”
instruqt

2. I like building and learning new things,
and sharing knowledge with others.
ERIK VELD
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3. Founder of instruqt, focussing mostly
on the technical side.
ERIK VELD
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4. What is instruqt?
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5. Hands-on challenges that build skills on
DevOps and cloud.
WHAT IS INSTRUQT
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6. Each user gets real infrastructure to
complete the challenges in.
WHAT IS INSTRUQT
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7. Solutions are validated against the user
infrastructure.
WHAT IS INSTRUQT
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8. Enough talking, demo time.
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9. 9
DEMO
PLATFORM

10. HOW IT STARTED
10
2016 2017 2018
HashiConf EU
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13. HOW IT STARTED
13
2016 2017 2018
HashiConf EU
HashiConf US
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15. HOW IT STARTED
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2016 2017 2018
HashiConf EU
HashiConf US
Google Cloud Next
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17. HOW IT STARTED
17
2016 2017 2018
HashiConf EU
HashiConf US
Google Cloud Next
Current iteration
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18. How did we build this platform?
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19. HOW IT IS BUILT
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Google Cloud Platform Terraform Golang
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20. Entirely on Google Kubernetes Engine.
GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
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21. GKE gives us resilience, isolation,
service discovery and scaling for free.
GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
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22. Everything as a service from Google.
GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
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23. GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
23
more
Container Registry
Datastore Kubernetes Engine Cloud SQL Cloud PubSub Cloud Storage
Compute Engine Cloud Functions Firebase
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24. GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
24
more
Container Registry
Datastore Kubernetes Engine Cloud SQL Cloud PubSub Cloud Storage
Compute Engine Cloud Functions Firebase
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25. GOOGLE CLOUD PLATFORM
25
more
Container Registry
Datastore Kubernetes Engine Cloud SQL Cloud PubSub Cloud Storage
Compute Engine Cloud Functions Firebase
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26. Terraform manages our platform and
all of the services we use.
TERRAFORM
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27. TERRAFORM
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Describe what the desired state is,
don’t worry about how it’s achieved.
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28. GOLANG
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With the small footprint and fast start
time we scale in seconds not minutes.
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29. GOLANG
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With many interdependencies, a
monorepo solves a lot of problems.
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30. Tool inception.
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31. Let’s take a look behind the scenes.
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32. Terraform creates environments on
the fly, inserting variables where
needed.
BEHIND THE SCENES
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33. 33
DEMO
BEHIND THE SCENES

34. BEHIND THE SCENES
34
> PODSSERVICES
CONFIG
SECRETS
PROXY TRACK
NAMESPACE
OTHER INFRA
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35. Any container will work, platform
dependencies are injected at runtime.
BEHIND THE SCENES
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36. # The volume is mounted in the pod from a git repository.
volume {
name = "bootstrap"
git_repo {
repository = "https://url-to-git-repo/bootstrap.git"
}
}
volume_mount {
name = "bootstrap"
mount_path = "/opt/bootstrap"
}
# Wait until the volume is mounted, then execute the setup script.
args = ["until [ -d /opt/bootstrap/ ]; do sleep 1; done;
/opt/bootstrap/setup.sh"]
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37. Because terraform stores the state of
each user environment, cleanup is easy.
BEHIND THE SCENES
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38. 38
DEMO
BEHIND THE SCENES

39. How does terraform know
what to build?
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40. The SDK creates a skeleton, which is
then filled out and sent to the pipeline.
TRACK PIPELINE
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41. 41
DEMO
CONTENT CREATION

42. Golang templates generate terraform
code that creates user environments.
TRACK PIPELINE
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43. # The variables that need to go into the template.
data := struct {
Containers Container
}{ … }
# Create the destination file.
f, err := os.Create(outputPath)
# Parse the templates.
t := template.New(templateName)
_, err = t.ParseFiles(inputPath)
# Execute the template with the data.
for _, tmpl := range t.Templates() {
tmpl.ExecuteTemplate(f, tmpl.Name(), data)
}
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44. # Loop over the containers in the config.yml file.
{{range .Containers}}
resource "kubernetes_replication_controller" "{{.Name}}" {
spec {
template {
container {
name = "{{.Name}}"
image = "{{.Image}}"
}
# Etc.
}
}
}
{{- end}}
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45. 45
DEMO
GENERATOR

46. Because of Container Builder we do
not have to run a build server anymore.
TRACK PIPELINE
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47. 47
DEMO
CONTAINER BUILDER

48. The platform and build pipeline are
scalable.
The challenge is scaling ourselves.
LESSONS LEARNED
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49. Stand on the shoulders of giants and
use this to focus on your product.
49
LESSONS LEARNED
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50. Migrating to a different cloud provider
is not as much work as you might think.
LESSONS LEARNED
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51. 51
Thank you!
Erik Veld
@erikveld
instruqt.com