DevOps Classroom Series – 06/Oct/2020 – Direct DevOps from Quality Thought

Story of Contenment Info Systems

Contenment info Systems develop applications for Car Manufactures for CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
The following are the users of the applications
- Car Dealers
- Car Manufacturers
- Car Owners
- Car Technicians
- Car Service Advisors
- Car Sales Advisors
Contenment Car Care (C3) is the Product Name.
Architecture of the application looks as shown below
Customers of C3 are
Customers have different virtual environments where c3 has to be deployed
The application space where c3 is operating is highly competitive, so to keep up to market, lots of new features are added and Contenment info Systems has signed a deal for deploying applications on customer environments for free with zero down time.
How Can Contenment info Systems solve this?
They have following teams
- Customer Specific Project Manager:
  - Benz: Annie
  - Tesla: Anthony
  - Ferrari: Andrew
  - BMW: Alica
- Architecture Team: Beckham
- Implementation team
  - Developers
  - Testers
  - DevOps
There are two major problems in deploying applications quickly
- Freqeunt releases with zero downtime commitment
- Different Customer Environments
Web Server Deployment Steps
- Ensure the Operating System is Linux
- Install a nginx/apache server
- Deploy the application package on webserver installed
Contenment Info Systems has the following possible ways of deploying applications
- Manual Approach
- Ad-hoc scripts (Shell/Powershell)
  - Create a script in any scripting language of choice (shell/powershell/python)
  - Scripts are procedural (What has to be done & How it has to be done)
  - Pros:
    - This is straight forward
  - Cons:
    - Changes are difficult to handle as the we might end up rewriting
    - Maintainability & Readability will be impacted
  - Examples: Shell, Powershell, Perl, Python Scripts
- Configuration Management tools
  - They are declarative in Nature
  - Here we tell what we want
  - Examples:
    - Ansible
    - Chef
    - Salt Stack
    - Puppet
    - Powershell DSC
- Server Templating Tools
  - We create a virtual machine image with the application installed
  - Examples: Packer
- Provisioning Tools:
  - All of the above approaches speak about deploying applications on the server. whereas provisioning tools work on creating servers and then calling adhoc scripts or configuration management to deploy application.
  - Provisioning tools in the case of Contenment Info Systems Can create the below on almost any virtual platform
    - Network
    - Storage
    - Virtual Machines
    - DB layers
  - Each Vendor has their own provisioning tool
    - AWS => Cloudformation
    - Azure => ARM Templates
    - OpenStack => Heat
    - Google => Google Cloud Deployment Manager
  - Terraform is a provisioning tool which can work with literally any virtual platform.
The Choice for Contenment Info Systems for creating infra would be terraform
Now DevOps Team of C3 have to create infrastructure using terraform.