Infrastructure as Code

REDtalks.live #36 – Christian Weber from GitHub on Infrastructure as Code

/ Nathan Pearce / Leave a comment

Delighted to have GitHub’s Christian Weber on the show this week to share his experiences with Infrastructure as Code.

Watch this episode to hear Christian explain some personal experiences, from his days before he worked at GitHub, where Infrastructure/Configuration as Code would have made a big difference. Learn from first-hand experience how certain practices can bring order back to a dire situations.  But if you’re too busy right now, you could just come and hear our talk at the F5 Agility conference in Boston (August 13th – 16th) titled “Super-NetOps: Configuration as Code”

“…by treating everything, like a configuration file, as a template we go back into our previous state without relying on a failure state as a means of recovery…”

Christian Weber, GitHub

 

Enough words from me, Christian’s wisdom awaits you in the video below:

 

Thanks for listening!

REDtalks.live #34 – GitHub Integration v0.2 released

/ Nathan Pearce / Leave a comment

Greetings automators!!! I am delighted to be sharing with you the release of the GitHub Webhook Server for BIG-IP v0.2. w00t!

This release was a major re-write that touched almost every line of code. Why? Well, as with many early prototypes, in the first release I just wanted to see if it could be done. And from the experiment I learned a lot about integrating with GitHub, took a lot of notes, and, well, v0.2 is the result of all those findings: a more robust integration that you should totally take a look at yourself!

The two key adds to version 0.2 are:

  • deployment queuing – so we don’t DDoS the Control Plane with many concurrent declaration commits at once
  • octokit –  in v0.1 I used native HTTP calls to the GitHub API. In v0.2 I switched to the GitHub octokit/rest.js node module, which simplified a lot of code. And simple = robust.

There’s a couple other features I snuck in there, which you can see in this demonstration video:

 

If there are any features you’d like to see, please create a GitHub Issue against the repository, here: https://github.com/npearce/n8-GHE_IaC_WebHook/issues

For more episode on Network Infrastructure as Code, go here: Network Infrastructure as Code

Thanks for listening!

REDtalks.live #31 – Network Configuration as Code – Part 3

/ Nathan Pearce / 2 Comments

Install, Setup and Troubleshooting

Other episodes in this series:

Welcome to part 3 in this Network Infrastructure as Code series. In the previous episodes I provided some demonstrations and also best practices with Role-based Access Control and Change Rollbacks. In this episode we’ll cover how to setup your own Network Infrastructure as Code environments, in addition to some troubleshooting tips should you run into any problems.

Thanks for listening!

REDtalks.live #30 – Network Configuration as Code – Part 2

/ Nathan Pearce / 2 Comments

Role-based Access Control and Change Rollback

Other episodes in this series:
Welcome to part 2 in this Network Infrastructure as Code series. In the previous episode we introduced the concept of Network Infrastructure as Code and performed a quick demonstration. In this episode we’re going to cover best practices around Access Control and how to roll back changes.
Infrastructure as Code is a great stepping stone towards integrated and automated ‘continuous deployment’. However, for those not quite ready to hand over control to an automated system, applying traditional approval processes to network infrastructure as code is probably a good idea. You’ll also notice that Network Infrastructure as Code has great change back-out capabilities, much better than traditional management models.
Enough of the words, take a look at the video below and let me know your thoughts!
Thanks for listening!

REDtalks.live #29 – Network Configuration as Code – Part 1

/ Nathan Pearce / 2 Comments

Introduction to Network Infrastructure as Code

Other episodes in this series:

Greetings viewers and welcome to a short series of technical demonstrations on Infrastructure as Code.

In my field experience I noticed that most Infrastructure as Code implementations were oriented around ‘server’ infrastructure. As a huge fan of developer tooling being used to improve traditional operations, I thought I’d take a look at bringing Infrastructure as Code practices to managing F5’s BIG-IP App Services appliances.

In this video you’ll see the management of L4 – L7 App Services entirely from within GitHub Enterprise. Totes cool, right! In this first episode I’l just run through a quick demo, followed by a more detailed review in Part 2 (coming soon).

 

Thanks for listening!