Habitat - Learning from Configuration Management

Habitat is a new approach to automation that focuses on the application instead of the infrastructure it runs on. This talk explores some of the lessons learned from configuration management that helped influence the design of Habitat.

This talk was given by Nathen Harvey and Matt Ray at the Austin DevOps Meetup.

http://www.meetup.com/austin-devops/events/231889101/

Transcript

1. Learning from Configuration Management Nathen Harvey Austin DevOps Meetup & June 16, 2016
2. Nathen Harvey VP Community Development Chef Software, Inc. @nathenharvey Your Picture Goes Here
3. Configuration Management
4. Configuration Management Tools • CFEngine • Puppet • Chef • SaltStack • Ansible • Consul
7. Things that could be better... Centralization
8. Immutable Infrastructure Things that could be better...
9. Things that could be better... Hidden Dependencies
10. Things that could be better... Orchestration
11. What we really want Choreography
12. Things that could be better... Application Release Patterns
13. Things that could be better... Toolchains
14. What would it look like … if we built for choreography instead of orchestration?
15. What would it look like
16. What would it look like if we built • … for large distributed systems that are topology aware? • … a way to run immutable systems with flexibility and ease? • … a way to strip out hidden dependencies? • … a simplified toolchain?
18. Config Management isn’t dead!
20. Habitat Components
21. Habitat Components • Habitat Studio - an application packager
22. Habitat Components • Habitat Studio - an application packager • Habitat Plans - instructions to download, compile, and install
23. Habitat Components • Habitat Studio - an application packager • Habitat Plans - instructions to download, compile, and install • Habitat Depot - a place to upload and download your app packages
24. Habitat Components • Habitat Studio - an application packager • Habitat Plans - instructions to download, compile, and install • Habitat Depot - a place to upload and download your app packages • Habitat Supervisor - an intelligent runtime with deployment coordination and service discovery built in
26. Package Format (.hart) Plan Artifact Depot Bare Metal Containers AMI VM 1. Packaging an application starts with a plan. A Plan is as simple to create as a Dockerfile 2. Start by launching the isolated Build environment called a “Studio” a. Enter the studio (hab-studio enter) b. Define your Plan (vim plan.sh) to define the software build from source using standard BASH c. Define the Configuration template for the software, using Mustache (logic-less scripting language) d. Define the Configuration defaults, using TOML (configuration language) e. Define Hooks for supervisor behavior: initializing, running, defining a health check, etc f. Create Signing Keys for your Origin (hab origin key generate myOrigin) g. Build your Artifact (build myOrigin/myPlan) 3. Post-process Artifact for target environments: Docker, Rocket, CloudFoundry, Mesos, Kubernetes, etc... 4. Run and test Artifact (docker run -ti myOrigin/myPlan) Habitat Workflow
27. Depot Artifact Supervisor: An Intelligent Run-Time Supervisor w/ REST API (hab-sup) Supervisor Supervisor Supervisor Supervisor Ring Leader Initializer Stand Alone • Part of an Artifact, the Supervisor manages Application node behavior at runtime, providing automation and intelligence: ◦ Utilizes predefined Plan to manage application behavior ◦ Built in service discovery ◦ Self-organizes with other Supervisor nodes on a Ring into topologies ◦ Rings have no single point of failure • Supervisor executes a variety of hooks for defined behavior: ◦ Init, run, health_check, reconfigure, file_update • Supervisor is accessible via REST API: ◦ /config, /health, /status, /gossip, /census, /election Habitat Technology
28. Security & Management Secret Payloads Service Service Service Service Pub Key Symmetric Encryption Service Service Service Service Load Balancer • Enterprise-grade security allows for secure runtime management of configurations and payloads ◦ Encrypted, authenticated run-time configuration ◦ Automatic, safe, atomic software updates based upon policy (example: Blue/green deployments) ◦ Dynamic topology updates ◦ Handles inter-service discovery through binding 29 Habitat Technology
29. Habitat Technology Plan Artifact Depot Build Service Supervisor Supervisor Supervisor Supervisor Ring Bare Metal Containers AMI VM Depot Build Service & Workflow Package Format Artifact Distribution Server Artifact Distribution Server Intelligent Run-Time Supervisor w/REST API Source Code Repo
30. • Applications run as distributed, fully automated, and capable autonomous actors • Immutable applications, but flexible and easy to manage because automation travels with the application • Bundles what your apps need to run and nothing else • Embedded automation choreographs application cluster topology/behavior • A network with no reliance on external services and no single-point-of-failure • Provides continuous deployment without traditional Application Release Automation (ARA) tooling The solution is the same: • For new and legacy applications • No matter the application runtime environment Habitat’s approach
31. “Cloud Native” is a code-word for “Rewrite it all”
32. Habitat Application automation that enables modern application teams to build, deploy, and manage any application in any environment - from traditional data-centers to containerized microservices.
33. > Operating System centric; application automation becomes complex > Focused on integrated SDKs; “Cloud Native” rewrites > Building tools around applications; pushing in the old direction > Focuses on the grid as the unit of automation; apps must be specialized > Focuses on the container as the unit of automation; apps are opaque. Wait, doesn’t X do that?
34. We believe that all applications can be autonomous across any platform Plan Collaborate Inspect Build
35. 36 Live Demo
36. Try Habitat for yourself • https://www.habitat.sh/try • Tutorials • Getting started guide • Extensive documentation • Open Source! – https://github.com/habitat-sh/habitat Thank you! Q&A