Building an Automated Infrastructure

In this session, we will show one method of building an automated infrastructure by presenting a live demonstration company in EC2. First we will cover all of the components necessary for any automated infrastructure to be successful:

1. Operating System Installation –- having a consistent, repeatable operating system install.
2. DNS –- Having a reliable, up to date, standardized naming scheme.
3. System Inventory and Classification (iClassify) –- Centralized, query-able information about the entire infrastructure.
4. Version Control –- The heart of the infrastructure: you should be able to rebuild from scratch with nothing but a recent checkout.
5. Configuration Management (Puppet) –- No more manual configuration.
6. Identity Management (LDAP) –- Consistent authentication and authorization for every internal service and application.
7. Monitoring –- Fully automated, always up to date, automated monitoring.
8. Trending –- The data you need on how your infrastructure is performing.
9. Application Deployment –- How the automated infrastructure paves the way for an ideal application deployment mechanism.

Then we will present a series of use-cases, walking the audience through how each component interacts to help them solve real-world problems. Sample use cases are adding a new application server and application troubleshooting.

All the tools presented will be open source, and we’ll make sure that attendee’s have a hand out detailing each of them (and a workflow of how they fit together).