Lesson 11: Devops & Configuration Management Intro

Session Summary

Devops Introduction

What is it?

"A software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) operations professionals." [Wikipedia]
[Wikipedia]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DevOps

Definition of Devops

Wikipedia (cc)

The old view

"Dev":side being the "makers"
"Ops":side being the "people that deal with the creation after its birth”
_images/silo-fire.jpg

photo by http://thoriseador.deviantart.com/ (CC)

This siloed environment has created much harm in the industry and the core reason behind creating Devops.

Burn down those silos!

History of Devops

The Agile Approach

Manifesto:

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

Adapting Agile to Ops

Better Tools enable Devops

Explosion of new tools over the past few years:

  • Release tools (jenkins, travisci, etc)
  • Config Management (puppet, chef, ansible, cfengine)
  • Orchestration (zookeeper, noah, mesos)
  • Monitoring & Metrics (statsd, graphite, etc)
  • Virtualization & containerization (AWS, Openstack, vagrant, docker)

It's not NoOps

What is Devops Video

Devops Explained: No Horse Manure

Configuration Management

What is it?

"Configuration management is the process of standardizing resource configurations and enforcing their state across IT infrastructure in an automated yet agile manner." [PuppetLabs]
[PuppetLabs]http://puppetlabs.com/solutions/configuration-management

History of CM

Infrastructure as code

CM Platforms

CM Platforms (part 2)

Puppet Example

package { "apache":
  name    => "httpd",
  ensure  => present,
}

service { "apache":
  name    => "apache",
  ensure  => running,
  enable  => true,
  require => Package["apache"],
}

Chef Example

package "apache" do
  package_name "httpd"
  action :install
end

service "apache" do
  action [:enable, :start]
end

CM Platform Comparison

References

Traditional Development Workflow

Scenario: Developer Mary Smith wants to deploy SystemView to a server administered by Ivan Bofh, a strict old-school sysadmin.

email conversation link

Email #1

>>>>>> On April 3, 2013, at 4:22 PM, Mary Smith <msmith@cruftware.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Ops team,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> As discussed in the release schedule distributed by Mr. Bossman on 2/5, the
>>>>>> development team is ready to deploy our flagship product SystemView this week.
>>>>>> We will need Python 3.4 an Virtualenv on the production server, as well as a
>>>>>> correctly configured Nginx vhost to direct users to the site.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> When we log into the production server to deploy the app's code, we'll need
>>>>>> permission to write to /var/www and all of /etc for configuration reasons.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Please also create the user and tables detailed in the attached spreadsheet on
>>>>>> our MySql 5.7 database.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Mary Smith
>>>>>> Lead Developer, CruftWare SystemView product division

Email #2

>>>>> On April 5, 2013, at 9:15 AM, Ivan Bofh <ibofh@cruftware.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> Mary,
>>>>>
>>>>> Our production systems are standardized to CentOS 6, so Python is only
>>>>> supported up to version 2.6. The Python 2.6 version of virtualenv can be
>>>>> installed after you work with legal to file documentation of a full security
>>>>> audit of the package.
>>>>>
>>>>> Providing any account, let alone root, to developers on a production system is
>>>>> absolutely out of the question. Just document the app's deployment process
>>>>> clearly and we'll handle it.
>>>>>
>>>>> Ivan Bofh
>>>>> Senior Systems Engineer, CruftWare

Email #3

>>>> On April 5, 2013, at 11:32 AM, Mary Smith <msmith@cruftware.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Ivan,
>>>>
>>>> That sounds like it will be simpler to just install the dependencies directly
>>>> on the server instead of using virtualenv. I should be able to include this
>>>> in the Jenkins configuration, as long as the CI users is running as root.
>>>> Speaking of which, the development team will need access to Jenkins or other
>>>> continuous integration in order to automatically update the site when changes
>>>> are pushed.
>>>>
>>>> Is mysql-dev installed yet? Also please confirm that the database is at
>>>> systemview-prod.mysql57.cruftware.com.
>>>>
>>>> Mary Smith
>>>> Lead Developer, CruftWare SystemView product division

Email #4

>>> On April 6, 2013, at 10:08 AM, Ivan Bofh <ibofh@cruftware.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Mary,
>>>
>>> Why do you need to use Jenkins? I Googled it and it looks like a non-standard
>>> and immature implementation of some of CFEngine's features. Just send me a
>>> CFEngine configuration file for the settings that you need. The updates can be
>>> done with an SVN post-commit hook.
>>>
>>> Due to administrative decisions that Mr. Bossman explained in a company-wide
>>> memo a couple of months ago, absolutely no dev libraries may be installed on
>>> production servers. Servers are for serving, not for compiling.
>>>
>>> Ivan Bofh
>>> Senior Systems Engineer, CruftWare

Email #5

>> On April 6, 2013, at 10:14 AM, Mary Smith <msmith@cruftware.com> wrote:
>>
>> Do you at least have the Nginx vhost and uWsgi installation ready?
>>
>> Mary Smith
>> Lead Developer, CruftWare SystemView product division
>>
>> On April 6, 2013, at 1:53 PM, Ivan Bofh <ibofh@cruftware.com> wrote:
>>
>> We don't use Nginx or uWsgi. The specs should have said to convert the app to
>> work with Apache and mod_wsgi for production deployment.
>>
>> Ivan Bofh
>> Senior Systems Engineer, CruftWare

Email #6

> On April 6, 2013, at 2:37 PM, Mary Smith <msmith@cruftware.com> wrote:
>
> Ivan,
>
> What's the URL for the database?
>
> Mary Smith
> Lead Developer, CruftWare SystemView product division
>
On April 6, 2013, at 4:22 PM, Ivan Bofh <ibofh@cruftware.com> wrote:

Mary,

You'll have to contact Sharon Negative (snegative@cruftware.com), our DBA, and
file a ticket to get the database access. She won't be back from vacation for
another 2 weeks so it might take awhile.

Ivan Bofh
Senior Systems Engineer, CruftWare

DevOps Workflow

Scenario: DevOps-oriented developer Simon Johnson wants to deploy SystemView to a server administered by Ada Opdev, a DevOps-oriented sysadmin.

irc conversation link

IRC #1

14:03 < JnomiS> AdaOpdev: hey, all the systemview tests are passing on
                python 3.4
14:04 <@AdaOpdev> yay! I'll spin up a VM on the cluster with the production
                  cookbook
14:04 < JnomiS> that'll be at sysview23dev.internal.ourcorp, right?
14:05 <@AdaOpdev> actually we're migrating over to a new test cluster
14:05 <@AdaOpdev> could you use sysview23.dev.ourcorp instead?
14:06 < JnomiS> sure
14:06 <@AdaOpdev> it's set up for passwordless ssh login with your ldap
                  account
14:07 < JnomiS> ok, awesome.
14:07 < JnomiS> thanks!

IRC #2

15:12 < JnomiS> hmm, I've been building mysql-python for the app with the
                mysql dev libraries, but it doesn't look like you have
                those in production
15:22 < JnomiS> also, what database should i connect to from the dev
                instance? I've been using MySql 5.7 in testing
15:25 <@AdaOpdev> just get me a list of the names and databases you'll
                  need, and I'll plug them into our MySql Chef cookbooks.
15:25 <@AdaOpdev> I checked the ORM docs, and you're not actually using any
                  features that changed between MySql 5.5 (which is what
                  we've got in production right now) and 5.7
15:26 < JnomiS> okay, I'll run the tests with mysql5.5
15:27 < JnomiS> everything seems to be working fine locally

IRC #3

16:00 < JnomiS> ugh, I totally forgot -- I'll need to get root on the dev vm
                so I can install uwsgi and nginx
16:00 <@AdaOpdev> We actually manage UWsgi and Nginx through chef as well.
                  Have you written cookbooks before?
16:02 < JnomiS> nope, I've always just used yours :)
16:05 <@AdaOpdev> http://reiddraper.com/first-chef-recipe/ and
                  https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-create-simple-chef-cookbooks-to-manage-infrastructure-on-ubuntu
                  are a couple of good places to start
16:05 < JnomiS> thanks!

IRC #4

16:52 < JnomiS> do we have jenkins deployed anywhere yet?
16:53 < JnomiS> I'd like to get continuous integration set up
16:54 <@AdaOpdev> I've heard of Jenkins but not worked with it much
16:54 < JnomiS> yeah, it'll automate that deploy hook mess we used to have
16:54 <@AdaOpdev> cool!
16:55 <@AdaOpdev> let's talk to our boss about getting an instance
                  provisioned
16:55 < JnomiS> okay, I'll email him about it and cc you
16:57 <@AdaOpdev> thanks
16:57 <@AdaOpdev> for now let's keep using Chef for everything we can
16:58 < JnomiS> okay, sounds good.

Non-DevOps

DevOps