Infrastructure automation by example

Re:Infrastructure automation by example by dkarapetyan on Sunday September 28, 2014 @06:13PM (#8381056)

The configuration management landscape is full of good ideas but there are too many of them and most of them end up being the equivalent of C++ for infrastructure automation. You can do anything and everything in 10 different ways that are all equally complex. Chef for example has 9+ levels of attribute overrides ranging from X different cookbook attributes to Y different role attributes. I ask why are there so many override levels and there is no good answer because I've never needed more than 3 levels of attribute overrides. There's more but the override levels on their own are already enough headache. Then there are the ones that use a custom configuration language. I enjoy writing and using DSLs as much as the next guy but the whole point of DSLs is to keep them away from the Turing completeness threshold. As soon as you cross it there is no point in having one. All of the tools commit this sin except for Chef which just embeds the DSL in Ruby.

There is also the fact that none of these tools actually address cloud provisioning. They all work really well once you have your entire topology mapped out but do nothing to actually help with building that topology. That's why I'm hoping Terra takes over because it addresses this aspect of configuration management and I rather use something from Hashicorp than some other vendor.

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by bkeroack on Sunday September 28, 2014 @06:21PM (#8381072)

Saltstack (http://docs.saltstack.com) and the included salt-cloud handle cloud provisioning rather well.

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by sciurus on Sunday September 28, 2014 @07:45PM (#8381207)

What are all the cloud resource types that salt can provision? All I can find are computer instances and volumes, which is not nearly enough to meet my needs. When bring up a new application on AWS, off the top of my head I need to create an autoscaling group, launch config, load balancer, cloudwatch alarms, dns entries, and ec2 instances.

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by UtahDave on Sunday September 28, 2014 @07:53PM (#8381226)

Look at the boto_* modules here: http://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/salt-modindex.html#cap-m

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by sciurus on Sunday September 28, 2014 @09:27PM (#8381365)

That's more promising! Thanks for the pointer. At present the list contains

    salt.modules.boto_asg	
    salt.modules.boto_cloudwatch	
    salt.modules.boto_elasticache	
    salt.modules.boto_elb	
    salt.modules.boto_iam	
    salt.modules.boto_route53	
    salt.modules.boto_secgroup	
    salt.modules.boto_sqs

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by dkarapetyan on Sunday September 28, 2014 @06:44PM (#8381102)

Ya, it looks like Saltstack has a pretty good handle on it just going from the docs.

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by TheIronYuppie on Sunday September 28, 2014 @07:12PM (#8381154)

Chef also has provisioning, which should get St exactly what you want for all the major providers.

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Re:Infrastructure automation by example by sciurus on Sunday September 28, 2014 @07:40PM (#8381197)

AFAIK chef only handles compute resources, e.g. it can set up EC2 instances but not volumes, IPs, load balancers, autoscaling groups, etc.

[0] https://docs.getchef.com/plugin_knife_ec2.html

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