What is Infrastructure and why you should automate it? Typical Infrastructure Benefits CMS/ Automation Chef / Terminologies / Disadvantages Ansible / Disadvantages Demo Summary Author: Waqar Alamgir; Twitter @wajrcs

1. INFRASTRUCTURE AUTOMATION
WITH CHEF & ANSIBLE
Tips & tools for automating your web infrastructure.
Waqar Alamgir @wajrcs
https://github.com/waqar-alamgir/tutorials/tree/master/vagrant-lamp-ansible

2. Here’s What I’m Going To Talk To You About!
 What is Infrastructure and why you should
automate it?
 Typical Infrastructure
 Benefits
 CMS/ Automation
 Chef / Terminologies / Disadvantages
 Ansible / Disadvantages
 Demo
 Summary
 Questions

3. Meet this IT GUY & Service Provider

4. Why you should automate your web
infrastructure
 All of your configuration information is in one
place.
 You can spin up perfectly configured servers
instantly.
 You can change things in one place and have
them propagate through your entire system.
 You can create dev and test environments, that
are exact replicas of your production.

5. Infrastructure
 A high performance, reliable, and secure
integrated technology infrastructure for managing
multiple hosted applications by Application
Service Providers.
 Application infrastructure, comprised of
application servers, web servers, and often
database servers, is a core component in most
network architectures.

6. Typical Infrastructure

8. Benefits
 Technical benefits:
 Continuous software delivery
 Less complex problems to fix
 Faster resolution of problems
 Business benefits:
 Faster delivery of features
 More stable operating environments
 More time available to add value (rather than
fix/maintain)

9.  PHP
 Nginx
 Redis
 PostgreSQL
 Gearman
My Typical Project

11. Configuration Management Software
 Ansible
 Chef
 Puppet
 SaltStack
 CFEngine
 Juju
 many others

12. What is Chef?
“Reality-based automation for the cloud.”
“Infrastructure as Code.”
“A global view of your system as opposed to local
one”

13. Terminologies
Chef Server?
 Central storage for all your chef config.
 Stores all your git repo stuff as structured data in
json.
 Uses CouchDB for storage and quering
 Hosted Chef free for up to 5 nodes – then you
should host it yourself.

14. Terminologies
Knife?
Command line tool to interface between your local
code repo and your chef server.

15. Terminologies
Nodes?
Servers in your system.

16. Terminologies
Roles?
A nice way of abstracting what a node does and
what should be installed on it. i.e.
 A webserver role
 A database role
Open up firewall for front-end severs.

17. Terminologies
Cookbooks?
The base unit of configuration, so you would have
a cookbook for nginx, postgres, gunicorn, etc.

18. Terminologies
Recipes?
A computer program that runs cookbooks
Mostly written in Ruby or Python

19. Chef Infrastructure

20. Chef Infrastructure

21. Chef disadvantages
 You need to know Ruby (infrastructure as code)
 Need to install Chef Client on nodes
 Chef Client can be broken (example, Rubygems
Sandbox in 11/12 versions)
 Different teams with different approaches
 Documentation is not perfect
 Too many tools and options

22. Who is Using Chef
 Facebook, with over 20K instances
 Yahoo!
 IGN
 Nordstrom
 Dream Host
 Target
 Bloomberg

23. Ansible
 Runs locally (push model, like Chef Solo)
 Client-less (need only Python)
 YAML configs, "command to infrastructure"
 Huge community
 Ansible Tower for more automation

24. Ansible Infrastructure

25. Ansible disadvantages
 Bad team workflow
 Small flexibility in coding
 Poor development testing
 Limited support for Windows
(from 1.7 can use winrm,
but still not perfect and small amount of modules)

26. Who is Using Ansible
 Twitter
 Apple
 NASA
 CISCO
 Juniper
 HootSuit

27. Demo Application - LAMP Stack
Provision Theme
 Common system level tools
 MySQL, Memcached, Beanstalk
 Web tools as Apache, PHP

28. Demo Application - LAMP Stack

29. Demo Application - LAMP Stack

30. Demo Application - LAMP Stack

31. To Sum it all up….
 You should really, really, really use something for
server configuration.
 Chef: Ruby code to infrastructure.
 Ansible: YAML commands to infrastructure, with
no clients.

32. <Thank You!> Questions?
Contact Information
twitter: @wajrcs
github: https://github.com/waqar-
alamgir/tutorials/tree/master/vagrant-
lamp-ansible