Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Continuous Integration of Infrastructure
Nick Cammorato
Stability is the name of the game for systems and networks operators. It's
what we expect and what our end-users expect, but it can be incredibly
difficult to achieve - a constant stream of security patches, dead-end
releases, broken software, broken hardware, and demands from other
internal stakeholders force change. Constant, never ending change.
Complicating this is the fact that these changes are rarely isolated. A
change on one system (particularly a lower-layer system like a router) can
ripple through entire services. We have, in effect, an integration
problem with every software update or configuration change we apply. So
to solve this, we look to the software development world to see how they
deal with it, and the answer is continuous testing and continuous
integration.
At TERC, we're currently combining configuration management (puppet),
hierarchical configs (hiera), monitoring (nagios), test
software (rspec/cucumber), and a software development CI
stack (jenkins/rake/vagrant) in order to address this. This talk will
focus on my experiences in rolling all of this out, what the limitations
of current software are, and touch on what my plans are to improve it.
MIT E-51, Room 145
7:00 - Announcements & Introductions
7:30 - Formal presentation
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