Principal Cloud Technologist, Kief Morris explores ways to implement cloud-based systems using automation tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Docker, Kubernetes (anything, really) with change as a first-class concern. Apply agile engineering practices like Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Delivery to your infrastructure. Adopt design patterns to make your infrastructure architecture loosely coupled and resilient. The concepts discussed here are relevant whatever your tools of choice, and should be of interest to any technical practitioner, architect, or decision maker involved in designing and implementing cloud-style infrastructure.

1. Kief Morris
Head of Cloud Engineering Practices

2. EVOLVE!
Your Infrastructure
Kief Morris

3. kief@thoughtworks.com
Head of Cloud Engineering Practices
Twitter: @kief
Book: http://oreil.ly/1JKIBVe
Site: http://infrastructure-as-code.com

4. CLOUD

5. RISK

6. Throughput
Poor Throughput Instability
Stability

7. State of the DevOps Report
https://devops-research.com/
Accelerate,
Nicole Forsgren, PhD,
Jez Humble,
Gene Kim

8. THROUGHPUT
STABILITY
The Four
Metrics
DEPLOYMENT
FREQUENCY
LEAD TIME FOR
CHANGES
CHANGE FAIL RATE
TIME TO RESTORE
SERVICE

9. "The highest performers
excel at throughput and
stability"
State of the DevOps Report 2018
Nicole Forsgren, PhD, Jez Humble, Gene Kim
https://devops-research.com/

10. ThroughputStability

11. FastSlow
Stable
Unstable

12. Prioritize
throughput
over stability
FRAGILE
MESS
FastSlow
Unstable

13. Prioritize correctness
over speed of change
Stable
Slow
Unstable
FRAGILE
MESS

14. Agile, Lean,
DevOps
FastSlow
Stable
Unstable

15. "Since we can't avoid change,
we need to exploit it"
Building Evolutionary Architectures
Neal Ford, Rebecca Parsons, Pat Kua

16. OPTIMIZE
FOR
CHANGE
AS CODE
CONTINUOUS
VALIDATION
SMALL
PIECES

17. Define all
your stuff
AS CODE

18. Define infrastructure as code
Infrastructure configuration is:
• Visible
• Reusable
• Consistent
• Testable

19. Infrastructure PLATFORM
Compute
Storage
Networking
Amazon AWS
Microsoft Azure
Google Cloud
Platform
Digital Ocean
OpenStack
VMWare

20. Infrastructure STACK
A collection of infrastructure
resources defined and
managed as a unit
Terraform
AWS
CloudFormation
Azure Resource
Manager
Google Cloud
Deployment
Ansible Cloud
Modules
OpenStack Heat
Chef Provisioning
Puppet
Provisioning
Salt Cloud

21. Application Runtime Platforms
APP
Serverless
Runtimes
APP
APP
Virtual
Machines
APP
APP
APP
Container
ClustersPhysical
Hardware
APP
APP

22. MANAGING MULTIPLE
ENVIRONMENTS

23. Many-headed stack antipattern
Test Staging Production
our_env/
!"" test.tf
!"" staging.tf
!""
production.tf

24. Changes have a wide blast radius
Test Staging Production
our_env/
!"" test.tf
!"" staging.tf
!""
production.tf
😢

25. Singleton stack antipattern
our_env/
!"" test/
!""
servers.tf
our_env/
!"" staging/
!""
servers.tf
our_env/
!"" production/
!""
servers.tf
Test
Staging
Production

26. Code changes by copy/paste
our_env/
!"" test/
!""
servers.tf
our_env/
!"" staging/
!""
servers.tf
our_env/
!"" production/
!""
servers.tf
Test
Staging
Production

27. Template stack pattern
test instance
stack
source
code
Staging
Production

28. CONTINUOUSLY
VALIDATE all work
in progress as you
go

29. Automatically test every change before applying it

30. Promote changes to environments using a pipeline
BUILDLOCAL
APPLY
TO QA
APPLY
TO PROD
Sandbox
QA Production
APPLY
TO TEST
Test

31. Processes and controls
are enforced by code
Every change is logged
and traceable, from
commit to production
Enable governance with pipelines
Environment Definitions
Test Code
Compliance Specifications
Pipeline Definitions

32. Challenge: Feedback cycles
This stuff is slow.
Very.
Very.
Slow.

33. BUILD SMALL,
independently
releasable
components

34. Break out server roles
Stack
Java
Cookbook
Tomcat
Cookbook
Appserver Role
Monitoring
Agent
Cookbook

35. Test server configurations
Test configuration
elements separately Provision and test using
virtual machines or
containers
Test locally or on build
agents

36. Extract separate pipeline stages for
server configuration
Test stack definition
Test server configuration
Test integrated system

37. Monolithic stack
Wide blast radius, high coordination
overhead
😢

38. Divide infrastructure into multiple, independently changeable
stacks

39. Each stack has its own pipeline to deliver changes

40. Draw boundaries to optimize for change

41. How to start?
Build first?
Or automate first?

42. Automation makes delivery faster
and more reliable
Adding automation afterwards
probably means rebuilding

43. Build incrementally
Automate as you go

44. kief@thoughtworks.com
Head of Cloud Engineering Practices
Twitter: @kief
Book: http://oreil.ly/1JKIBVe
Site: http://infrastructure-as-code.com