I continuously observe changes in infrastructure automation and DevOps overall. If you are practicing DevOps and monitoring developments in the area, just recall 1 year old project and ask yourself if you would do it same way today, I can bet, the answer will be “No”. The main reasons are developments of new frameworks and tools which in turn affect workflow, process aspects and result in new patterns.
Oldschool
Lets figure out how people used CM tools until now
- Bootstrap/provision servers.
- Apply Desired State Configuration cookbooks to update, deploy, orchestrate services.
- Maintain static inventories (server lists) or use some modules to refresh dynamically.
- Write complex cookbooks (often modules) to support all areas of application maintenance etc.
The above way to deliver change is in place in many organizations due to many reasons, such as, historical, legacy environments, process limitations etc…
So what has changed in 2016?
Almighty Public Cloud
2016 even skeptics would classify as “Cloud Age”, migration is inevitable trend for most of companies. To prove this, just look how impressive AWS re-invent 2016 was, dozens of new services, features.
Cloud, in turn, brings new possibilities to scale and automate.
Cloud, in turn, brings new possibilities to scale and automate.
Containers as a mature technology.
Simple example, 90% of projects we delivered last year used container based stacks or used them to some extend.
Emerging patterns
CM tools usage during VM provision became not so critical, however, still important, due to “baking” of OS images with tools like packer. Often confdand consul template do all dynamic reconfiguration.
All infrastructure orchestration is done on IaaS or PaaS layers. As a result, configuration frameworks often limited to maintainance of image build.
Static CM inventories doesn’t work with cloud. An instance must be able to discover service and register itself within CM tool.
Micro services, which is increasing trend, deploy is trivial and CM framework is often overkill.
FYI: In the article I don’t try to cover all trends and paterns, just higlight some observations based on personal experience.
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