2. Presenter CV
Patrick Bolduan
Digital Technology Department, Global Digital Division
ASICS Corporation
20 years building web applications (product/app dev/ops)
12 years involved platform operations (MTV/ASICS)
16 years in Japan
よろしく
3. ASICS Corporation
Global Headquarters: Kobe
Global presence: Over 240 countries
Digital Presence: Over 50 countries
Global Brands
ASICS, Onitsuka Tiger, ASICS Tiger, Haglöfs, Runkeeper
9. ASICS Corporation
Global Headquarters: Kobe
Global presence: Over 240 countries
Digital Presence: Over 50 countries
Global Brands
ASICS, Onitsuka Tiger, ASICS Tiger, Haglöfs, Runkeeper
10. ASICS Corporation global footprint
Global presence: Over 240 countries
Digital Presence: Over 50 countries
Over 120 websites
Around 8 global web
application platforms
More than 5 data centers
with a mix of bare metal
and cloud
12. Outsourced ops challenges
● Ops practices inconsistent across vendors
● Missed opportunities for leveraging scale
● Performance varied from poor to just “OK”
13. Ops improvement plan proposed...
Build in-house operations
team to manage strategic
platforms
mostly...
14. Modern ops team building research
PaaS PaaS
Search internet Attend conferences
15. What is a PaaS?
Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) is a category of
cloud computing services that provides a platform allowing customers to develop, run, and
manage applications without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure
typically associated with developing and launching an app.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_as_a_service
IaaS
PaaS
SaaS Software as a Service
Platform as a Service
Infrastructure as a ServiceXaaS Pyramid
16. Ops is automated to the point
where all engineers are
focused on delivering value to
your product
PaaS goals =
17. What is a full blown PaaS good for?
Environments with many different apps with variable stack
requirements
21. PaaS focused team building...
● Review and select PaaS vendor options
● Write job descriptions for FTE team members
● Start vendor contract negotiations and FTE hiring
process...
30. Initial project: target end state
Project: https://getqor.com
Github: https://github.com/qor/qor
● Automated infrastructure management
● Manually triggered consistent app deploys
● Ability to create ad hoc full copies of production
43. What is Terraform?
Terraform is a cloud management automation tool
Why was Terraform used in this case?
Terraform has robust cloud feature automation capabilities
and simple code structure
64. What is Packer?
Packer is a tool for creating machine images (AMIs)
Why was Packer used in this case?
Outputs AMIs as artifacts which can easily be used to
populate Terraform managed ASGs
65. Packer machine image build process
1. platform image build
a. image with bootstrap dependencies to app builds
b. reusable – update as required by dependencies
2. application image build
a. uses platform image a starting point
b. app and dependencies installed from git repo
c. image used to populate asgs
67. Packer config file basics
.json files: Packer configuration files with build rules
.yaml files: variable used in the image build process
.sh files: build process control scripts
.pp files: puppet manifests
80. Ops team manual task offload
● >90% ops tasks automated with Terraform
● Some manual task remain: SSL cert, production DNS
● Ongoing tasks: perf monitoring, architectures changes
81. App dev team impact
● Long* deploy process: packer build → terraform apply
● Easy to provision number of identical dev environments
● Reliable cross environment testing
*For this case Packer builds take between 15 and 20 minutes.
82. General impact
● 3 more apps have been automated after initial project
● Overall manual ops team tasks going down
● App teams have reliable access to test environments
● All environments are consistent across dev process
● General impact: very positive
87. Next steps for ASICS ops
● Automate deploy process with Jenkins and Ansible
● Trigger app deploys with git commits
● Apply learnings to other app environments
● Iterate and improve capabilities towards PaaS
88. Takeaways
● PaaS still relatively new as a concept
● Lots of opportunities to reduce burden of ops tasks
● “Ideal ops state” will depend on your needs