What's the best part of starting on something new? You get the opportunity to take everything you've learned, and make something better. As a system grows over time, one of the biggest challenges we face is ensuring it’s as stable tomorrow as it was yesterday. As part of a move from physical data centers to AWS over the past year we were given the opportunity to bring together a group of people with varied experience writing software and designing complex infrastructures and systems to solve this problem. Our collective experiences led us to make testing and automation central to everything we did. We’ve achieved this using a variety of tools to such as Terraform, Puppet, Test Kitchen, Serverspec, Jenkins, Docker, and even some custom written libraries to fill in the gaps. There are a lot of moving pieces to track when deploying and configuring infrastructure and applications. This talk will focus on our solution. If you’d like to hear about how we’ve orchestrated standing up, and maintaining an environment, ensuring its stability by testing along the way, this talk will be for you. We will discuss the tools we’ve used, and what problems they’ve allowed us to solve as we’ve moved through this migration. We’ll discuss what has been great as we’ve progressed, and what could have gone better. We’ll talk about what other tools exist on the market, and why we made the decisions we did along the way.

1. Test Driving Your
Infrastructure

2. Who Are We?
Jesus Alvarez
Systems Engineer
@jeezusalvarez
github.com/demizer
Jessie Puls
Systems Engineer
@jessiepuls
github.com/jessiepuls

3. Migrating a 15 year old infrastructure
to the cloud
Infrastructure as code
Testing Everything
What’s been successful (and probably a little about what hasn’t)

4. Goals
● Modernize & replace aging
infrastructure
● Improve application & server
deployments
● Improve stability and flexibility of
our application
● Remove Knowledge Silos

5. What Problems Exist?

6. Manual Changes

7. Everything is Always Broken

8. Everything Takes Too Long
INSERT IMAGE HERE

9. Silos of Knowledge
You Are Here

10. Tools

11. How We Create Environments
Terraform to define infrastructure & manage state
Puppet to manage configuration
Abstract the differences
Write tests to prove it

12. How We Migrate Between Environments
Environments are defined by git branches
With that environment’s configuration
And tests

13. How We Deploy
Automation using Jenkins pipelines & DSL Plugin
Orchestration using Choria playbooks
Custom mcollective agents

14. Continuous Integration & Automation

15. Make It Visible
All of this is reflected on our build monitor which is visible to anyone in our team
space

16. What Lessons Have We Learned?

17. Get Everyone Involved Early

18. Choose the Right Team
INSERT IMAGE HERE

19. Be Flexible

20. Discover Problems Quickly

21. Automation is Reproducible

22. Questions?
Examples and slides:
https://github.com/J-And-J-Productions/2017-puppetconf
Feel free to contact us:
@jessiepuls @jeezusalvarez