Monday, February 22, 2016

HashiQuest

I'm starting a new project at work to build a new infrastructure for hosting our apps.  My objectives/requirements include:

  • Elastic - something we can easily scale up and down.
  • Redundant - something that can tolerate reasonable outages.  With the recent Xen security issues, I've had more than one ride in the reboot-rodeo, and I'm getting tired of that.
  • Invented Here as opposed to Not Invented Here (NIH) - I inherited the existing infrastructure, and there's nothing wrong with it per-se, but because I didn't build it, it surprises me from time to time.
  • Immutable - I want to get on the immutable infrastructure bandwagon because it's what the cool kids have been doing.  But, as I get into this, I realize that immutable infrastructure can lead to...
  • Fearless - I want to be able to make changes quickly and easily without uttering "what could possibly go wrong?" before each change.
To achieve these objectives, I plan on using tools from HashiCorp to build out a pretty traditional infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.  I'm a big fan of HashiCorp and their tools.  Most of their tools are open source, which I like for cost and "religious" reasons.  Mitchell Hashimoto was my first guest on the SE Radio podcast when HashiCorp was just launching, and he's great.  Once my infrastructure is up and running, I look forward to using their Atlas tool to manage it all and pay Mitchell for all the great stuff he's done.

As mentioned, my initial plan is to build the first version of the infrastructure using AMIs running on EC2 instances as opposed to building Docker containers or running on Google Compute Engine. I made that decision in part to be more conservative (I hate explaining our current environment to prospective customers - no one ever got fired for picking IBM/Cicso/Amazon.)  However, by using HashiCorp tools, I am hoping that I can keep my options open in the future.

Hence, I have begun what I'm calling HashiQuest.  Stay tuned.

Charles.

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