
How We Automate Our Infrastructure - lambtron
https://segment.com/blog/automating-our-infrastructure/
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avitzurel
This seems to be the "new standard" when it comes to startup infrastructure
beyond Heroku.

However, what frustrates me the most about it, is that every startup is left
to figure out everything from scratch and it seems impossible.

There are many tools you need to familiarize yourself with, too many to be
comfortable with.

Companies that already figured it out write blog post like this, which provide
insights but it's super high level, as a startup engineer this gives you
absolutely no value other than "yes, they are using it too".

I wonder if there's a solution for this generic enough to open source that
will be a good start for startups.

You check out the project, read some docs and in 2-3 hours you have a cluster
running. Kind of a "batteries included" devops solution.

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DanielDent
We've actually been considering if we should turn our internal environment
into a product and/or service-product mix.

We've got a mostly automated cloud-agnostic process for spinning up a multi-
datacenter Mesos cluster which integrates nicely with a docker CI workflow.

I'm pretty sure it's quite valuable, though I'm also unclear what people would
be willing to pay.

~~~
helloiamaperson
> I'm pretty sure it's quite valuable, though I'm also unclear what people
> would be willing to pay.

Your solution probably works great for your needs, but this stuff is expensive
to productize. See [https://www.openshift.org/](https://www.openshift.org/)

~~~
DanielDent
Who I note basically decided to start from scratch because this docker thing
happened. Cloud Foundry has had to do a lot of re-thinking too.

But my impression of openshift is that it's really a work in progress and that
they haven't actually gotten it adequately productized yet.

Docker has gotten enough developer buy-in into containerization that I think
it's fundamentally changed what it means to do infrastructure, be it PaaS or
IaaS or whatever.

~~~
brazzledazzle
Probably an oversimplification on my part but it seems like OpenShift is nice
enterprise friendly features sprinkled on top of Kubernetes. Which is no small
thing, they've contributed quite a few patches to Kubernetes that are critical
for a lot of enterprises. And a read/write GUI shouldn't be a hard requirement
these days but a lot of big companies have this ingrained habit of treating IT
like a commodity and subsequently hire people that are so uncomfortable with
the CLI they're openly hostile to the idea of even touching it.

Then there's command and control. OpenShift seems to be more friendly to
keeping things under someone's thumb. In an ideal world people would use
Kubernetes the way Google uses Borg and devs would be trusted the way they are
at Google. But between corporate fiefdoms and the aforementioned hiring
practices many companies are still very far from that ideal.

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drakenot
This past summer I spent some time learning Ansible. I've written scripts for
the configuration and the deployment of my application's various services. The
built-in idempotency of the commands was a big win for me and I feel fairly
productive using the tool now.

My only complaint with Ansible really has been that it feels slow at times.

I'm interested in checking out Docker. What exactly does it buy me over my
Ansible config/deployment scripts? Does it obsolete them?

~~~
dexterbt1
Ansible and Docker are orthogonal technologies. Docker buys you repeatable,
application packaging to solve dev/prod parity. Ansible can then become your
orchestration tool, doing the heavy lifting to manage not just containers, but
hosts, dns, LBs, etc.

~~~
drakenot
But by using Docker, it does change the way you use Ansible, right? I'm not
going to be executing Playbooks against a set of hosts anymore to configure
them.

Instead, I guess I'll be using a Ansible to configure a container locally (in
place of using Dockerfiles)? Then perhaps a different Playbook to deploy this
container to my hosts?

~~~
DanielDent
One way I like to think about it: docker pull is the new apt-get

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jacoelho
if you aren't setting capabilities, changing users and limits, and docker is a
packing system

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webo
Really wish this article either included more details or segmentio open-
sources a few of the tools.

~~~
calvinfo
Totally hear you.

We're planning on open-sourcing some pieces of our Terraform config and
service toolkit in the next few months. We're definitely excited to share our
internal tooling with the rest of the community.

~~~
webo
Awesome, looming forward to it!

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kreutz
Checkout Convox.com. Stellar team behind an awesome project.

