DevOps Classroom Series – 25/May/2021

DevOps Pipeline and Configuration Management

• Once the Developer commits the code to the VCS, the build system picks the code and generates the software package.
• We need to take this software package and then create the Test Environments
• In Enterprise:
  • Lot of developers will be committing the code and then we need make lot of software deployments in the servers before we go for the live environment
  • We need to deploy the package into various environments
    • Environment for System Tests
    • Environment for Performance Tests
    • Environment for UAT
    • Live/Production Environment
• To Summarize:
  • We need to do this activity of deploying and configuring application repetitively
  • Manual deployments are ruled out

Possible Solutions for automating deployments

• Solution 1: Write a Shell/PowerShell Script to deploy and configure the application
  • The effectiveness of the script largely depends on the developer
  • Shell Scripts are not readable
  • It becomes difficult to handle changes and maintaining the solution
  • Making the script work on different Linux Distributions is slightly complex
• Solution 2: Configuration Management (CM)
  • In Shell Scripts, we script on the basic philosophy How to do but CM works on philosophy What has to be done i.e. we specify a desired state.

Configuration Management

• An effective configuration management solution can benefit your environment in a number of ways including
  • Saving Time
  • Improving Availability
  • Improve Control
  • Allow us to Do more with Less
• Configuration Management Architectures
• Ansible, Salt uses Push Based CM
• Chef, Puppet follows the Pull Based CM

PULL BASED CM

• In Pull based CM for the nodes to communicate with the CM server, there will be a software agent (chef agent, puppet agent) which will trigger the communication from node to CM Server
• DevOps/IT Engineers need to express the desired state in the supported format by the CM Server and upload the configurations to the server
• So lets learn about how to write the configurations in Chef and upload them to the chef CM Server and make that configuration work on some node.

Exercise

• Create an account in manage.chef.io Refer Here
• Create an Azure free tier account Refer Here
• Refer Here to create AWS account
• Install necessary software’s on your system Refer Here
• Installing Windows Terminal Refer Here