an agile approach to cloud infrastructure

AN AGILE APPROACH TOINFRASTRUCTURERichard Seroter@rseroter

Richard SeroterSr. Director of Product at Pivotal

Lead Cloud Editor for InfoQ.com

9-time Microsoft MVP for Integration

Technical Trainer at Pluralsight

3-time Book Author

Team vs. silo orientation

Weak spots cause problems

Delivery team succeeds together

#1 Review characteristics

#2 Discuss org changes

#3See examples

Characteristics

Elastic Infrastructure

On-demand Infrastructure

Ephemeral Infrastructure

Metered Infrastructure

Simple Infrastructure

Connected Infrastructure

Supported Infrastructure

Consistent Infrastructure

Miniaturized Infrastructure

Abstracted Infrastructure

ElasticInfrastructure

What Is It?

Adapt your allocated infrastructure to

current need.


Why does it matter?

Experiment with quick performance tests

Save time by responding to spikes, troughs

Save money by scaling tiers independently


How to do it?

Scale server count (e.g. AWS Autoscale)

Scale server instance (e.g. CTL Cloud resize)

Scale app pool (e.g. Google Container Engine)

On-demandInfrastructure

What Is It?

Infrastructure available whenever

you need it.


Why does it matter?

Experiment quickly

Expand reach via access diverse geographies

Realistically test software


How to do it?

Cloud environment (public or private)

Local, virtualized stacks

Shared hosts (e.g. running containers or PaaS)

EphemeralInfrastructure

What Is It?

Infrastructure lives only for short

periods.


Why does it matter?

Easily discard unused resources

Avoid overburdened, shared environments

Minimize expensive monitoring and patching processes


How to do it?

Use immutable infrastructure patterns

Make gold images/containers easy to produce and share

Provide visibility and tools to prune unused resources

MeteredInfrastructure

What Is It?

Pay-per-use based on consumption.


Why does it matter?

Encourage responsible consumption

Increase transparency related to operational costs

Accelerates transition to automation-driven solutions


How to do it?

Cloud hosting with per-resource billing and visibility

Use CI tools that can spin up infrastructure as needed

SimpleInfrastructure

What Is It?

Constrained but adequate set of infrastructure

choices.


Why does it matter?

Focus on innovation, not debating hardware options

Staff doesn’t have to remember unique setups


How to do it?

Set up catalog of preferred configurations in cloud

Focus on key computedimensions

Offer channel for teams to share upcoming needs

ConnectedInfrastructure

What Is It?

Infrastructure that is accessible to core

services.


Why does it matter?

Avoid wasting time configuring individual access

Run a secure, standard setup

Accelerate deployments and experimentation


How to do it?

Bridge networks between environments

Ensure that shared services (DB, messaging) are accessible

Give teams access to push to production

SupportedInfrastructure

What Is It?

Infrastructure that’s owned and

maintained by the right team.


Why does it matter?

Security and licensing risks from infrastructure sprawl

Teams on pooledinfrastructure assume support

Encourages transition to DevOps


How to do it?

Base images/containers defined with best practices

Automation provided for management at scale

Modern techniques for ephemeral instances

ConsistentInfrastructure

What Is It?

Identical, repeatable configurations across

environments.


Why does it matter?

Save time troubleshootingsnowflake servers

Empower teams to quickly build standard environments

Apply best practices and avoid accidental security holes


How to do it?

Treat infrastructure as code (e.g. Chef, Ansible)

Build environments using evolving, but standard, definitions (e.g. Terraform)

Constantly reset environments to avoid “drift”

MiniaturizedInfrastructure

What Is It?

Developers using local, production-like

environments.


Why does it matter?

Simulate runtime setup on a smaller scale

Avoid “works on my machine” problems

Accelerate onboarding of new team members


How to do it?

Shared sandboxes

On-demand cloud development environments

Virtualization templates (e.g. Vagrant)

AbstractedInfrastructure

What Is It?

Remove inherent knowledge of what sits beneath your

applications.


Why does it matter?

Focus only on application tier

Design more portable systems

Achieve higher density environments


How to do it?

Microservices bundled into containers (e.g. Docker)

Use asynchronous, serverlessapp constructs (e.g. AWS Lambda)

Leverage an application platform (e.g. Cloud Foundry)

Changes Needed

PMO

Organizational Impact

Finance Human Resources Development Operations

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Real World Example

Project Management

Product teams track large infrastructure demands

Rarely have line items for building infrastructure

Finance

Clear transparency on infrastructure costs

Projected costs factored lightly into business cases for new teams

Human Resources

Hire generalists

Incentivize transparent, impactful performance

Development

Familiarity with infrastructure and configmanagement

Comfortable with multiple application containers

Operations

Build a solid base platform

Help define standard configurations

#1 Review characteristics

#2 Discuss org changes

#3See examples

Thank you!

Richard Seroter@rseroter

an agile approach to cloud infrastructure

Technology