Tag Archives: devops
Amazon CloudFormation (an introduction)

CloudFormation is the core functionality provided by Amazon Web Services in the area of expressing infrastructure as code. One can write the infrastructure design in either JSON and YAML (with similar syntax keywords); there is also a template designer that may help in putting together the infrastructure elements and their dependencies. The particular details of each resource being defined must be coded out, though.

There are no limitations on the types of resources that can be brought up, as far as I noticed – each resource type provided by Amazon can be coded and subsequently created and provisioned. One can also define an explicit order (e.g. some resource to be created before another), apart from the implicit order that can be deduced (e.g. if an EC2 instance is defined with a IAM Role, the role is always created before the instance). The revert process is also clean: deleting the CloudFormation stack does delete everything created by the stack itself; nothing gets left behind.

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When there’s no route forward (or so you fear)

Note: This is a text about the project work at one of my previous employments.

Introduction

These days everybody talks about Agile, Automation, DevOps and Continous (whatever), without truly understanding why things have gone in this direction. After all, for many years, a software project had a couple of well-known steps that needed to be followed, like:

  • Full, thorough planning at the very beginning and from time to time, before significant milestones;

  • Development, lots of development behind closed doors;

  • Lots of manual QA work, little automation with some custom-written testing framework written from scratch by one of the developers;

  • Infrequent releases (e.g. every year or even every other year or so); releases were thoroughly prepared and tested, with code freezes for (sometimes) months before the Day.

Even if everybody knows these days that such approach may have been a bad way of doing things, it actually worked for many years because that was the way the world expected things to work. There were many constraints, e.g:

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How to install a Chef Server

The setup was performed on a freshly installed CentOS 6 VM using a “minimal ISO” image from the CentOS Project website. The VM was set up on a local VirtualBox installation, all settings being left to default except for the memory which was increased from 512Mb to 1Gb. Of course, the more, the better, but 1Gb is the lowest one can go without facing serious memory swapping.

Initial Setup

The successful Centos 6 installation leaves the external network interface disabled upon the initial boot, so this must be fixed before anything else. One must look into /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and change the ONBOOT parameter from no to yes. Afterwards, the network subsystem must be restarted, e.g.:

# vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
...
ONBOOT=yes
...
# service network restart

Once the VM gets Internet access, it’s a good practice to update everything and reboot it before going forward with the Chef Server installation:

# yum -y update
# reboot

There is one important change one must perform in order to get the Chef Server properly set up: the hostname, as localhost.localdomain won’t do. The hostname must also be associated to a static IP address, which can be achieved in VirtualBox by playing with some networking settings (not presented here).

Inside the VM, this is easy to put in place:

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