Search the Community

Let me start by saying Ive lived the System Admin life for quite some time. The decoding title is in reference to: Installing, deploying, configuring, and monitoring servers in a rapid deployment manner. Most important of all, in a non-static and non-fragile manner. TL;DR security - Running services across multiple servers, that can be shut down in the event of intrustion or broken configuration and replaced with a new image with all the required configuration, out the gate on your reployment. You will be communicating and deploying over SSH sessions, so encrypted communcations are how you 'make the magic happen'. Here are some notes I took from a great presentation by Chris Rossi of AppliedTrust, that also got me running my own deployments. I am also working from the following book: Absible for DevOps by Jeff Geerling. As this is a technical and video game heavy site, Im sure many visitors and members know the struggle of single-thread processes not scaling your gaming hardware. By deploying your server topology with Ansible (Python based) and Vagrant (Ruby syntax) scripting, you get a performance scalable topology, where services can be allocated per Virtual Machine; while also being able to be replaced by a fresh spun VM, in the event of misconfiguration change or security exploit. You also get some botnet-like controls to distribute commands across all or selected servers in your Vagrant configuration. Personally, I have been learning Python to make tools to assist me in log crawling functions, configuration and other data driven projects. I legit feel like Ansible and Vagrant usage has progressed me beyond making bash script, as the state control / config deployment and validation is light-years beyond cobbling my own scripts from scratch. I have been exploring this for less than a week, so please excuse the details thus far. However I will say this knowledge is really addictive, since I am seeing my personal projects materialized in a deliverable, community cooperative platform of Ansible using Vagrant. Borrowing from Chris's presentation, patch deployment and distributing content is the final leg / deliverable of the DevOps process. Considering I am used to living a Windows SysAdmin life with the use of windows cmd and Linux scripting, this point resonates as solid truth in the compliance being the hardest deliverable, while being consistent. Did I mention scaling your network and sever topology? Because that is what you are up to with deploying dynamic servers in a VM environment. Get the most performance per service to VM, with added benefit of essentially real-time monitoring. In the event of a fault, you can also handle the decommission and re-launching of a new, compliant VM in the event of mis-config change / exploit.