Today at the HARNESS project integration team meeting I gave a brief presentation wherein I discussed DevOps and some of my favorite tools, namely Ansible, Vagrant, and Docker.
The central thesis of my talk was that a modern devops approach, based in version-controlled configuration management implemented using industry-standard deployment tools and making use of continuous integration and rolling updates is a must for creating robust distributed systems with lots of moving parts. Interactive configuration of cloud systems and virtual machines leads to unreproducible, poorly documented, error-prone “brittle” systems. It is the equivalent of collaborative authoring of documents by emailing word processor files, or software version control by having a backup/ directory containing numbered/dated zip archives. This leads to a “culture of fear” wherein people are afraid to try to fix known problems for fear of “making things worse”, and every roll out of of a new api or set of features becomes a dreaded nightmare.
Overall, the talk was well received. We also discussed the Vagrant workflow, and how, while Docker can be used to provision containers that function the same way as “lightweight” virtual machines, ideally each container should really only be running the minimum number of processes, following the single responsibility principle.
