InRhythm

Your partners in accelerated digital transformation

cloud engineering

Configuration Automation Tools: Orchestrating Your Deployment

“We must accept human error as inevitable – and design around that fact.” – Donald Berwick

Raphael Weaver

In our Technology field, buzz words come and go. One day we’re discussing how databases are the new best thing to the world of Agile Development and the next we see programming languages, frameworks, and methodologies bit the dust like an old western movie.

But one unchanging aspect of technology and its journey is the People who are an irreplaceable part of the creation, the demise, and the popularity of any given technology. This modern-day-world calls for a close to perfection execution, which humans cannot always account for. How does that affect us, the developers and creators, when we are called to building perfect products? 

Removing Human Error

Automation automation automation – and of course throw in some orchestration deployment and configuration management. Leaving the buzz words behind the jest of all of this, “new technology frontier”, is removing human error. This is removing the dependencies of tribal knowledge when it pertains to application and system administration job duties. Those job duties are performed in a repetitive fashion. The job duties are usually consolidated into various custom scripts, leaving a lot of those scripted actions the ability to be boxed up and reused over and over again.

For example, what steps does it take to deploy an application to a server instance? 

  1. Download and Install the various languages and/or framework libraries the application usages.
  2. Download, Install, Configure the Web server that the application will use.
  3. Download, Install, and Configure the Database that the application will use. 
  4. And finally Test to see if all the steps are installed and configured correctly. 

Last but not least run application tests to make sure it is running as expected. Those are the highlight steps for deploying an application to a bare metal, cloud, or virtual server. With a further review, there are numerous upon numerous additional steps. Something simplistic nevertheless highly catastrophic is a possibility of a typo. Consider this case, maybe in this scenario, I meant to type

cd /var/ect/ansible; rm -rf *

but instead I forgot the cd execute command and only ran

rm -rf /

Now my whole drive is erased. Surprisingly enough this can happen quite often even though I am pretty sure the source of truth of my drive is backed up. However, as Murphy Law states, what can happen will happen. And let’s be honest, redoing previous actions that could have been avoided is a down right pain.

No Hidden/Tribal Knowledge

Let’s look back at those steps to deploy an application to an environment. There are a lot of gotchas and/or small intermediary steps involved. For instance, I only listed the high-level steps. I hand these steps to a new engineer or even a junior engineer fresh out of college. The chances are these engineers will have to ask several questions on  “How to”. 

These series of questions will eventually lead to someone like myself saying “just let me do it”. This is how one scenario can lead to years upon years of hidden or tribal knowledge, as one may call it.  To harbor information like a fugitive on the run is getting more and more exposed in the IT/Software industry. The information should be a source of truth maintained in a repository database, that is easy and intuitive to leverage

Implementation Technology Overview

What does that source of truth entail? Can we not skip the documentation of information and go straight into the execution of the steps onto a given system? Or create scripts to reconfigure the application if there was ever a need to? Those questions have been proposed several times and solutions have been formulated several times into the form of extensive and comprehensive build tools/frameworks. These tools are used throughout the industry to solve the problem of orchestrated development, configuration automation and management. 

Furthermore, DevOps tools such as: Chef, Puppet, and Ansible are well mature automation/orchestration tools. Each tool will provide you with enough architecture flexibility to virtually handle any use case you present. Let’s take a slight dive into each one of these technologies.

Puppet

Puppet is the first widely used Configuration Automation and Orchestration software dating back to its initial release in 2005. Puppet uses the Master and Slave paradigm to control X amount of machines. The Ruby language is the script language say, for executing commands in a destination environment. 

The “Puppet Agents”(Slave) are modularized distinct components to be deployed to a server. This can be used for the creation of the server(ie. web server, database, application) in its destination environment.  The Puppet enterprise (Master) is comprised of all the inner workings to manage, secure, and organize agents.

Puppet Architecture

Documentation 

Chef

Chef is somewhat similar to Puppet. The core language used within Chef’s abstract module components is Ruby. Chef has several layers of management for your infrastructure automation needs. The Chef workstation is the primary area for managing the various Chef components. The Chef components consist of cookbooks, recipes, and nodes. The naming convention actually follows what you would consider these nouns in cooking to be with technical context of course. 

Recipes are collections of configurations for a given system, virtual, bare metal, or cloud environment. Chef calls those different environments nodes. Cookbook contains recipes and other configurations for application deployment and control mechanisms for the different Chef clients. Lastly, the whole collections of cookbooks are maintained in a Supermarket.

Chef Architecture

Documentation

Ansible

Ansible is the newest mainstream automation/configuration management tool on the market. Therefore, Ansible uses more modern programming languages and configurations concepts and tools. Python is the programming language used in this framework. One of the modern and fastest up-and-coming template languages is YAML. YAML is programming language agnostic and is a subset of the ever so popular JSON. YAML is used within Ansible to describe an Ansible playbook. 

Ansible playbook contains the steps that need to be executed on a given system. Once the Ansible playbook is intact configuration or further manipulation of the host can be executed through Ansible API – which is implemented in Python. There are several other components within Ansible technology such as modules, plugins, and inventory. 

Ansible Architecture

Documentation

Reusability

After covering a couple of the Configuration Automation and Development tools on the market you can see the vast amount of flexibility available in eliminating those repeatable steps from human error. This software’s framework promotes reusable software within an organization – which is the most viable. The ability to scale your application development environment and environmental infrastructure is critical. 

The learning curve may be deeper than using plain old bash scripts but the structure and integrity of using a proven tool and ease of maintenance outweigh the learning curve.

Check it for yourself, reorganize and propel your CI/CD process with Configuration Automation and Orchestrated Deployments and let me know what you think about this article in the comments below.

Raphael Weaver

Sr. Software Engineer

InRhythm’s Cloud Engineering Digest: Cloud, scale, microservices… and Java is there for you.

In this new digest you’ll find latest news, updates and recommendations about cloud-native architecture, patterns and anti-patterns in distributed systems and microservices.

It’s official: Apache Kafka 2.3 has been released!

Micronaut 1.1 GA has been released. You can find more details here.

Apache Dubbo, a Java-Based RPC Framework, Graduates to Top-Level Project

Project Loom: Lightweight Java threads

GraalVM 19.1: Compiling Faster

Java 13 Enters Feature Freeze and Ramp down

AWS Control Tower: The easiest way to set up and govern a new, secure multi-account AWS environment

Read:

5 Principles for Cloud-native Architecture: What it is and how to master it

API Gateways and Service Meshes: Opening the Door to Application Modernization

Patterns in Distributed Systems

Microservices adoption anti-patterns

Tell us what you think! What are you reading now? Let us know in the comments below or @GetInRhythm on Twitter

Learning and Growth at InRhythm


Technology changes at a torrential pace, and in order for InRhythm to continue to bring value to our clients, we have to innovate and keep pace with a rapidly evolving technology landscape. Should we advise clients to move toward a microservice architecture? Should our clients migrate to TypeScript? What is the significance of Design-First thinking? The only way we can answer these questions is by fostering a culture of learning and growth.

Learning and growth represent an individual’s commitment to continuously improve themselves and, as a result, continue to grow in their career. It starts with a personal dedication to learning and growing, but no one should have to make that journey alone. The culture of learning and growth at InRhythm can provide the necessary support and lift required for an individual to achieve their goals and scale the heights set for themselves. So, how do we define the culture of learning and growth at InRhythm?

Learning and Growth at InRhythm

Learning comes in various forms:

•  On-the-job
•  Self-learning
•  Learning from others
•  Instructional learning
•  And more

Clearly, there are various ways to learn, and you’ll pick and choose the form of learning best suited to your needs; it’s InRhythm’s job to support you in your journey. When you come to work with us, you have the ability to learn and grow with as well as join a larger community of people who are as passionate about what they love as you are. InRhythm supports this community of learners by creating an internal structure geared towards shared skills (or “Practice Areas”), a coaching program to foster mentoring and growth, providing PluralSight licenses for self-learners, and a community to help you write and publish content and hold learning events (code lounges, meetups, etc).

Practice Area

Practice Areas are how we internally organize ourselves. They are communities of individuals who share a common passion and skills around solving specific technology challenges but, more importantly, who are willing to continue to push the envelope within their domain by helping and learning from each other. You may be officially part of a single practice area, but you’re free to join other practice areas and learn from the community of learners within those practices. Here’s a quick overview of some of our practice areas:

•  Product Design: From design thinking to rapid prototyping, InRhythm designers craft end-to-end design strategies
•  Web Engineering:  React or Vue, Typescript or JavaScript; web engineers who are passionate about building applications with the right UI framework
•  Cloud Engineering:  Scalable services down to scalable data layer, involved in building microservice architecture for our clients

Each practice area community has its own dedicated Slack channel, and these channels are vibrant forums for sharing insights, asking questions, and learning by association.

Coaching Program

Given the explosive growth we’ve experienced over the last few years, it became clear that we needed to invest in a coaching program to support and scale employee growth. What is a coaching program and how does it benefit you? Our coaching program has two main goals:

•  Growth opportunities for individuals interested in leading and mentoring
•  Mentorship to help shape your career at InRhythm and beyond

InRhythmers interested in leading and mentoring volunteer to become coaches within the program. Coaches are responsible for guiding their mentees by meeting with them on a regular basis, shaping their career journey beyond InRhythm by helping them come up with their annual learning goals, and collecting and providing performance feedback. Coaches also have a seat at the table in helping shape their respective Practice Area’s identity, which could include everything from talent growth to strategic offerings. The coaching community across Practice Areas meet at a regular cadence to help each other and continue to brainstorm ways in which we can support the aspirations of our employees. An example of these efforts is the soon-to-be-unveiled Speaker Series. This series will be a monthly event where industry leaders will hold discussions around specific topics.

Each employee has a coach; in a distributed work environment, it’s great to have someone that will always be there for you, meet with you regularly, and be a cheerleader for your career at InRhythm and beyond. Our ultimate goal is to ensure everyone leaves InRhythm a better engineer, leader, and teammate than when they joined us.

Annual Learning Goals

This is the third and final way in which InRhythm promotes learning and growth.  Up until now, we have mainly focused on communities from Practice Areas to Coaching; however, annual learning goals are geared towards individuals and self-learning.  Let’s get right into the details.

Each individual should create an annual learning goal plan working with their coaches that will help them learn and grow in their careers at InRhythm and beyond.  This plan is truly meant for the individual to think about their career beyond InRhythm and indicate 4 things they will focus on achieving in an annual year. The individual items on the plan can be one of the following but not limited to technology, industry, book, professional development, and soft skills.  In addition to leveraging the communities to help with your individual goals, InRhythm also provides PluralSight licenses to help with your self-learning.

Career Growth

If we compare learning and career growth to the Input-Process-Output streaming paradigm the tools, structure, and support you have for learning is the input, how you leverage this support system and your dedication to learning is the process, and career growth is the result/output. It is natural to expect growth if you commit and dedicate yourself to learning and stellar job performance. We feel the same way. As mentioned before, our ultimate goal is to ensure you leave InRhythm a better engineer, leader, and teammate then when you joined us. At the same time, we would be thrilled and excited if you decide to continue to grow your career with us!  Each Practice Area will have levels defined with ideal expectations of behavior and skills for those levels. You bring the passion and dedication to learning, we provide the tools, structure, and support required for learning, and together watch you grow in your career.

Come learn and grow with us, and let’s take things to the next level together.