Infrastructure as Code

Our final MeetUp of the year and we will be discussing Infrastructure as Code.

Many IT teams still rely on manual configurations, custom scripts, golden images or outdated tools to manage infrastructure, resulting in errors and slow deployments. Organizations looking for faster deployments treat infrastructure like software: as code that can be managed with the same tools and processes software developers use, such as version control, continuous integration, code review and automated testing. These let you make infrastructure changes more easily, rapidly, safely and reliably.*

As DevOps evolves, Infrastructure as code has been described as the next logical step for IT**

We aim to provide an introduction to Infrastructure as Code, the positives and negatives plus an overview of some of the tools used.

We are still looking for speakers, so if you have something interesting to say, please do get in touch.

• https://puppet.com/solutions/infrastructure-as-code
  ** https://community.hpe.com/t5/Infrastructure-Insights/Why-viewing-infrastructure-as-code-is-the-next-logical-step-for/bc-p/6817900

Speakers

Alan Christie from Informatics Matters

Terraform - declaring your cluster

In this talk we'll take a brief tour of HashiCorp's Terraform. It's essentially an IaC provisioning tool. We'll explore the latest version's concepts accompanied by practical examples and end with a short demonstration of its capabilities for GitLab and AWS.

• What it is
• Configuration Syntax
• State
• Providers
• Input (Variables)
• Output (including templating)
• Modules
• Demos (GitLab and AWS)

After 30 years in broadcast, military, commercial and research environments starting with machine code and hardware in the 80's, Alan's worked up the programming stack through various languages and technologies and works at Informatics Matters near Oxford helping provide software solutions and consultancy to the life science sector including biotech and pharmaceutical companies. With a passion for beautiful code', testability and where readability counts he's someone who prefers to spend "writing code that writes code rather than writing code”.

Tanuj Goswami from Oxford Nanopore Technologies

Cloudformation and Beyond

Summary: A brief stroll down memory lane as to how we built a CI/CD pipeline with AWS Cloudformation, Ansible, Packer and Jenkins. Also, taking a look at the future of our pipeline as it comes towards the end of its lifetime.

Tanuj is a Network/DevOps/Ruby on Rails Developer at Oxford Nanopore Technologies. I have been designing and developing cloud systems for over five years now.