Infrastructure Hack-Day

In this (internal) workshop, I led a session to familiarize a group of operations engineers with Red Hat's Ansible and HashiCorp Packer, Terraform, Consul, Vault, and Nomad.

The workshop was structured in a way that each step formed the basis of the next one. The final result was codified and securely deployed infrastructure on AWS, using all the aforementioned products.

Transcript

1. Infrastructure Hack Day
2. Ansible Create playbook(s) to install common utilities and set sensible defaults. Bonus: create Ansible Roles for plays that can be useful for others
3. Packer Build a CentOS 7.x base image that utilizes playbooks built for the previous step. Bonus: make the image testable
4. Terraform Provision an EC2 Instance using the AMI built for the previous step. Bonus: create Terraform Modules for resources that can be useful for others
5. Terraform x Ansible Use the Terraform Ansible Provisioner to run playbooks once an instance has been provisioned. Bonus: find a way to continuously run the playbook (on every terraform apply)
6. Consul Ensure that instances are registered in Consul and become reachable via $instance.consul Bonus: Fill KV store automatically with metadata for an application
7. Terraform x Consul Inside Terraform, consume AMI IDs from Consul.
8. Terraform x Consul Inside Terraform, consume port numbers from Consul.
9. Ansible x Consul Inside Ansible, consume KV data from Consul.
10. Vault Create a Vault Server that utilizes a Consul backend and store database connection credentials inside of it.
11. Terraform x Vault Inside Terraform, consume database connection credentials from Vault and start a new RDS Instance.
12. Nomad Dockerize a Node.js-based application and schedule its run via multiple Nomad Agents.
13. Nomad Schedule a job to run via multiple Nomad Agents