Infrastructure As
Code
2015 Q2 EMC Accreditation
Jonas Rosland & Matt Cowger

What do we define as
infrastructure?

Why define infrastructure as
code?
• Deploy, monitor and connect together all the pieces
needed to run services for the organization
• Processes and tools for faster end-to-end delivery of quality
services
• Automation comes built-in

How do we do this?
• Desired state specified in text files
• Autonomic (self-corrects to desired state)
• State should be known through monitoring
• Remove snowflake servers

Why store them in text files?
• Easy to read and edit
• Shareable
• Can use standard version control like Git or SVN
• Becomes executable documentation

Simple example
node 'www2' {
class { 'apache': } # use apache module
apache::vhost { 'awesomewebsite.com': # define vhost resource
port => '80',
docroot => '/var/www/html'
}
}

Change root password
user { root:
ensure => present,
password => '$ecretP@ssw0rd',
}

Manually configured
environments are like a
house of cards in a china
shop
— Neal Ford

Snowflake servers
Deploying, provisioning and scaling automatically is virtually
impossible if every server is unique
Adds friction between the requestor and the deployer
Mistakes happen
We're all human

What can happen if
you don't treat
infrastructure as
code?

Some firms have
found that up to 60%
of failures are caused
by human error, not
hardware failure

Example - Knight Capital Group

Knight Capital Group - What
happened?
Manual deployment of new trading software
7 of 8 servers correctly updated
Old function still alive on the 8th server
led to
$440 million loss in 45 minutes

Treat your
infrastructure as code

Benefits
Self documenting infrastructure
You now have source code for how anything in your datacenter
is setup
Executable documentation

Further reading:
PuppetLabs
Vagrant
Docker
Infrastructure as Code: A reason to smile