HashiCorp Meetup #16

Hi Everyone! Back again with Octobers instalment of the London HUG and off the back of HashiConf US we have a couple of really interesting talks for you all! Huge thanks to our host Depop who have also been kind enough to provide the food and drink for the evening!!

We are aways interested in people getting in touch to present their own experiences with the HashiCorp toolset. If you have something that you want to speak about please get in touch with us here - https://goo.gl/forms/BomWAjwOquooVUkO2

Plans is...

6.30pm - Arrive - Beers, Pizza and socialising

7pm - Talk 1 - Lorenzo Saino - Software Engineer @ Fastly - Health-Checking as a Service with Serf

Health-checking is the process by which the health state of each component of a distributed system is monitored with the purpose of distributing traffic across service instances.

While conceptually simple, health-checking can often become as complex as the services they monitor. The operational readiness of a single service instance might be defined by multiple metrics, all of which must be efficiently processed and reduced into a single binary outcome. To complicate things further, the definition of operational readiness may vary according to the state of the overall service cluster; if too many instances are degraded, it is often beneficial to relax service levels. Building a scalable health-checking system which addresses all of these concerns while remaining reactive to failures can be extremely challenging.

This talk explains how we leveraged Serf to build a production distributed health-checking system that we use at Fastly, a globally distributed edge cloud. Our design borrows techniques from machine learning, signal processing and control theory to drive stable traffic allocation while quickly and accurately identifying failures.

7.45pm - Talk 2 - Radek Simko - Terraform Engineer @ Hashicorp - Terraforming the Kubernetes Land

Modern infrastructure can sometimes look like a wedding cake with many different layers. It’s no surprise for seasoned users that Terraform was able to provision the most lower layers - compute - for a long while. Skipping a few layers in between, workload scheduler like Kubernetes is typically represented as the top one, exposing high-level APIs for scheduling and scaling pods, managing persistent volumes and restrictions & limits for scheduling.

Terraform 0.10 comes with Kubernetes provider which supports all stable (v1) Kubernetes resources from K8S 1.6.

In this talk you’ll hear about particular examples of where it’s useful to use Terraform for managing K8S resources, what benefits do you get compared to other solutions and demo gods permitting you’ll also see how to get from zero to an application running on K8S.

8.30pm - Remaining, beer, pizza... TO THE PUB!

We are aways interested in people getting in touch to present their own experiences with the HashiCorp toolset. If you have something that you want to speak about please get in touch with us here - https://goo.gl/forms/BomWAjwOquooVUkO2