Getting Started

How to begin the HashiQuest?

The world of AWS is huge these days.  The HashiCorp tools can be counted two hands, but since they interface with AWS, that limited count is deceiving.

I actually started by getting the lay of the land from AWS in Action, which Manning conveniently had on special just about the time I was interested in learning more about it.  The book isn't an exhaustive coverage of all of the AWS services, but it's an excellent overview.  I did their tutorial for building a WordPress site.  The authors provide their code examples online in GitHub, which is excellent.

After that, Terraform seemed like the logical place to start since it deals with building infrastructure in AWS.  Again, I followed the online tutorial, and was pleased by the lack of drama.

I don't for a minute think that doing either of these tutorials qualifies as any real expertise, but I found that just typing the command and checking the results in the AWS console starts to build both the physical and mental "muscle memory."  Both tutorials were done with the free tier in AWS, and free (as in beer) is always good.

Next, I checked out a new tool from HashiCorp - Otto.  Otto is a successor to Vagrant, but it's heading in very different directions.  If you start thinking that Otto is just Vagrant++, it's hard to understand the infrastructure and deployment functionality that Otto provides.  Otto provides a path from a development environment on a single machine, to a simple AWS deployment, to a more sophisticated AWS deployment.

Because Otto is based on some opinionated policies and best practices, it provides a great way to see how all the pieces of the HashiCorp ecosystem and AWS fit together.  It generates plain-text configurations and scripts in the .otto directory in your project's tree.  These are there to read and learn from.  Some AWS masters might chafe at the best practices, but everyone's gotta start somewhere, so it might as well be something sane.

I'm not sure if this is the best way to learn about AWS and the HashiCorp tools, but it's what I've done.  Your milage may vary.

Enjoy,
Charles.

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.