My Four Steps for a successful cloud deployment - Design
18 January 2019 · Filed in Infrastructure Development BookApplication designed for Cloud
As the Cloud is a pay as you go service, the application should be too.
AWS’s CTO Werner Vogels speaking at Amazon re: invent said
‘While an Amazon EC2 instance might look like a server to you, it is not a server.
It is something you can switch off, it is a software component’.
With a disposable approach to servers and therefore the services that run on them,
this means considering start time, ungraceful shutdown, where the data lives,
and automation.
Many applications designed to run on Cloud can recover from infrastructure failure by
building themselves quickly, avoiding stateful and important data stored on the servers
wherever possible, replicating data to preserve it, and doing all this with as little human
interaction as possible.
For the infrastructure do this, DevOps borrowed from developers and created automated programs to do the heavy lifting involved in building server environments and recovering. By moving to a programmable model and storing the instructions to build the infrastructure in the form of executable instructions, the servers can build and recover themselves. This is known as Infrastructure as Code.
Imagine the instructions ready to be executed for an installation of SAS™, where at the click of a button and a few parameters, an environment or service group of servers is created, built, configured, and commissioned ready to work. This repeatable program empowers the developers to create their own version of the production servers, so that whatever they create and test is working in a way that the production version of that service is configured. This is because both have been created from the same code and instructions. This immediately removes the complexity and risk associated with deploying to production, as it has been tested and running in a near duplicate. This infrastructure code is designed with Cloud failures in mind to enable fast recovery. As it is code, it can be tested.
A tool for defining and running code to create infrastructure is called Terraform by Hashicorp. This is an open source tool owned by the community. With a collaboration mindset, this project is alive with updates. This tool enables instructions to be written, accessing providers of Cloud services, AWS, GCP, Azure, with new features added to the tool as quickly as it can be ordered via the Cloud provider’s API.
Once the infrastructure and servers have been created, the servers need to be configured. The three leading tools for this are Puppet, Chef and Ansible. All three can be used in an immutable way, allowing the servers to build themselves and enabling fast scaling and recovery from failure.
Who moved my servers. Available from Amazon in Paperback and Kindle now.