Infrastructure Automation at Scale

With Puppet and Friends

Nick Jones, Senior Cloud Systems Engineer

11th September, 2014

Introduction

Scalability

“Scalability is the ability of a system, network, or process to handle a growing amount of work in a capable manner or its ability to be enlarged to accommodate that growth.”

Scale-ability

• Repeatability

• Flexibility

• Diversity

• Transparency

• Automate!

• Configuration management and automation

• Programmatically define server and service configuration

• Relationships between services

• Driven by data

• Describe and document infrastructure

• Scalable

Puppet

Puppet Community

Neutron = 8422 LOC

Nova = 6678 LOC

Glance = 3336 LOC

Cinder = 6379 LOC

Horizon = 1681 LOC

Keystone = 4020 LOC

Ceilometer = 3710 LOC

~ 5000 CPUs, 1TB RAM

} 2478 LOC to deploy

OpenStack

Open Source

Puppet Code

# Install the MIBS meta-package package { 'snmp-mibs-downloader': ensure => latest, }

file { 'snmp.conf': require => Package['snmp-mibs-downloader'], path => '/etc/snmp/snmp.conf', content => 'com2sec local localhost public', }

Puppet Deployment Patterns

• A role is a high-level (business) description of a node’s function

• Roles decompose into profiles that include configuration specifics

• Profiles include various modules and take care of declaring the necessary classes and resources

The Foreman

• Lifecycle management• Physical and virtual• External node classification

(ENC) for Puppet

The Foreman - Architecture

Foreman and Puppet

Puppet

Foreman

Node

ProvisionData

Configuration

Foreman Dashboard

Developers, developers, developers, developers…

Development Process• Git for distributed version

control• Work on ‘feature branches’

locally• Push to local Git repo,

mirrored onto GitHub• GitHub’s “social” aspects for

code review• Merge into ‘master’ branch

on team consensus

Development Tools

• Packer• Virtual machine image creation

• Template stored in Foreman

• Automatically creates Vagrant boxes

• Vagrant• Define virtual environments• Puppet provisioner• Portable