A presentation given at FOSDEM 2017 about the open source DevOps stack OpsTheater

1. OpsTheater: Open
Source DevOps stack
Or, how to quit managing the infrastructure to
manage your actual infrastructure

2. About me
Walter Heck
CTO at OlinData since 2008
Certified Puppet Instructor since pre 1.0 days
Background: MySQL DBA, Delphi programmer, FOSS Lover
Almost 15 years of professional IT experience

3. The problem
● With the arrival of a new stack of tools comes a ton of time that needs to be
invested in managing a stack of tools to manage our infrastructure.
○ When can we start doing what we set out to do, manage those web/database/whatever
servers the business needs?
● A lot of infrastructure management is (should) be at the very least similar
across organisations given that best practices have been adopted.
○ Why should your OS monitoring be different from mine?
○ We all want centralised logging/monitoring/logrotation/etc.

4. The solution
A tool is good. Two tools is (probably) better. Two well integrated tools are best.
OpsTheater brings together some fundamental pillars that should be present in
every operations environment:
● Config management (puppet)
● Version control & CI/CD (GitLab / GitLab CI)
● Server Monitoring (Icinga)
● Centralised logging (ELK stack)
● ChatOps (mattermost)
We are all experts (?) in this field, why not share our knowledge?

5. Architecture
Log Storage / Analysis
Continuous
Integration
Configuration
Management
Version Control
System
Communication
Solution
Log Storage
Log Processing
Analysis GUI
Monitoring
Orchestration /
Provisioning
Provision Instances / Deploy Virtual Machines
Triggers automated builds in
Retrieves source code
integration
C
om
m
unication
Collaboration
Retrieves configurations
Physical InfraPublic CloudPrivate Cloud Virtual Infra

6. The vision
● A combination of publically acknowledged best practices open source
software glued together using puppet.
○ Built by a community of infra engineers with a common interest
● An abstraction layer that implements all things that are non-specific but
essential to an organisation’s infrastructure
○ Eg. when new puppet code is pushed to GitLab it needs to be tested by GitLab CI, a
notification should go to a chat room and the code needs to be deployed if all lights are green
○ Eg. a grafana dashboard should show all puppet runs and mark all failed ones
○ Eg. when diskspace on any server falls below 5% it needs to alert
○ Eg. when a server is managed through puppet it needs to have filebeat and a monitoring
agent installed

7. Who is this for? And who is it not for?
● Infrastructures with 10+ servers
● Environments ideally already using one or
more of these tools
● New environments
● Ops teams with skills in one or more of the
used tools
● Non-puppet environments (Puppet is the
glue between the components)
● Pure-sang cloud environments like AWS
(anywhere where puppet is not ideal)
● Very small infras (the overhead of 5 nodes
OpsTheater becomes too much)
● Fully implemented and automated
environments (retrofitting is a b*tch)

8. Current state of OpsTheater
Just released version 2.0.0 this week (hooray!)
● Easier to get started (`git clone && vagrant up`)
● Updated all tools and puppet modules to latest stable
○ ELK stack 5, Grafana 4.1, Puppet 4.9, Foreman 1.13, Icinga 2.6, GitLab 8.16
● Foreman Smart Parameters instead of hiera
● SMTP, LDAP working
In short, it’s the first version with basic integrations of all tools that makes it easy
for people to explore and contribute

9. The road ahead
● Deeper integration between tools
○ Automatic mattermost notifications for certain actions
○ ChatBots to interact with different parts of OpsTheater
○ Pre-compiled grafana dashboards
○ Automatically properly monitor servers
● Package management
○ Self-hosting versions of puppet modules
○ Pinning package versions
● Easier deployment
○ packer/terraform
● Security scans
● Automatic backup integration?

10. How can you help?
● Try it out
○ If you see problems, things that are unclear -> submit issues/PR’s in
http://gitlab.olindata.com/opstheater/opstheater
● Add functionality
○ Complete terraform/packer stuff
○ Make switching of eg. monitoring tool or centralised logging possible
● Spread the word (@opstheater)!
● Build us a website :)

11. Demo