[BBLISA-announce] June meeting: Nick Cammorato presents "Continuous Integration of Infrastructure"

[Adam Moskowitz]

Wednesday, June 12th, 2013
MIT Building E-51, Room 145
7:00  Introductions and announcements
7:25  Door prizes
7:30  Presentation

Topic: Continuous Integration of Infrastructure

Speaker: Nick Cammorato

Stability is the name of the game for systems and networks operators.
It's what we expect and what our end-users expect, but it can be
incredibly difficult to achieve - a constant stream of security patches,
dead-end releases, broken software, broken hardware, and demands from
other internal stakeholders force change. Constant, never ending change.

Complicating this is the fact that these changes are rarely isolated. A
change on one system (particularly a lower-layer system like a router)
can ripple through entire services. We have, in effect, an integration
problem with every software update or configuration change we apply. So
to solve this, we look to the software development world to see how they
deal with it, and the answer is continuous testing and continuous
integration. 

At TERC, we're currently combining configuration management (puppet),
hierarchical configs (hiera), monitoring (nagios), test software
(rspec/cucumber), and a software development CI stack
(jenkins/rake/vagrant) in order to address this. This talk will focus on
my experiences in rolling all of this out, what the limitations of
current software are, and touch on what my plans are to improve it.