InRhythm Spring Quarterly Summit: DevOps Workshop

Summary

In this workshop, we will demonstrate tools for provisioning infrastructure as well as how to construct a self-servicing platform for provisioning resources.  With these new developments in the industry, we will see how we can bridge the gaps between development and ops by allowing developers to self-manage cloud infrastructure to satisfy their needs.  We will also discuss the pros and cons to other tools for provisioning infrastructure and identify which tool can best fit a business’ needs.

For the hands-on interactive session, we will run through the necessary steps to get ourselves started with Pulumi and provision a resource onto AWS. We will also demonstrate Terraform to get a feel of the difference between the two popular infrastructure-as-code tools.  After that, we will setup some plugins to enhance our development experience with IaC.  Finally, we will setup a self-servicing platform and hook it into our IaC repository to allow for the provisioning of resources from a GUI. 

Why IaC?

Managing infrastructure can quickly become tedious as the number of resources being used on a cloud provider continue to grow.  With infrastructure-as-code, not only DevOps engineers, but developers can now lay out infrastructure using code.  Since it’s managed via code, version-controlling/source-code management tools are also available, making management of infrastructure significantly easier.

Why Backstage?

Self-servicing platforms are the best way to allow for engineers to provision resources and infrastructure for their needs en-masse.  With Backstage, we can provide a platform for engineers to come to and fulfill their needs whether it be creating a new microservice, a new repository, or even provisioning a new k8s cluster.  Furthermore, the provisioning of these resources can be standardized and made uniform to ensure that best practices are enforced.  Long gone are the days of submitting a ticket to create a new instance to deploy your application, with a wait time of a few hours or even a few days.  Self-servicing tools are the future of bringing operations into the hands of developers nad bridging the gap between development and operations.