vagrant up, Issues down

platform as code for the research and learning environment

Austin Parker | @austinlparker for UAlbany Open Source Festival 2014

Setting the Stage

Imagine this scenario

• Large, multidisciplinary research project or learning environment
• Participants and colleagues scattered across non-geographically contiguous areas
• Non-standard configurations of computing resources

The Problem

How do we make sure everyone is working with the same tools?

The Solution

Infrastructure as Code

What is Infrastructure as Code?

• Programmatically automate infrastructure tasks
• Infrastructure - Hardware, Servers, Monitoring and Analytics Software, and more

What about tools, though?

A virtual server is nice and all, but we need more for our purposes

Introducing Platform As Code

• Extend the IaC model to include development tools and libraries
• Less support headaches, quickly onboard new contributors or learners
• Customize to your specific needs - target specific versions and lock
• Write Once, Run Anywhere - deploy locally or in the cloud

The Foundations of PaC

• vagrant
• Manage and provision virtualized development environments
• Simple configuration, easy to share files between host and client OS
• puppet
• Flexible and customizable automation framework
• Declarative, model-based approach to define the desired state of an environment

Getting Started

Download Vagrant at http://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html

Find a Vagrantbox at https://vagrantcloud.com/discover/featured

Initial Setup

Final Notes

• Performance may be an issue, but you can deploy to the cloud
• VMWare user? You're in luck.
• Puppet and Vagrant are much deeper than what we've seen today

Questions?

Note: You can find the sample files used in this presentation at my github