Infrastructure as Code

I feel like I’m just memeing with the whole “as code” thing at this point - so let’s take it further and make a development environment as code. This will give you an instance of VS Code accessible in a web browser with access to all the buildtime and runtime dependancies I need to survive on this planet. As I further explore the theme of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), containers, and cloud-native technologies, I wanted to build an environment where I would be able to develop and effectively “control” my infrastructure securely, remotely, and from any device and wondered if it would be possible to work and develop entirely from a Docker container, which itself is defined and built using code checked into version control. Remember, one large benefit of keeping declarative infrastructure in version control is it effectively covers your backout plan for change management, which lowers your impact when deploying changes (rapid revert), and allows you to fail fast. Rolling back the change in your infrastructure merely requires rolling back in your version control system, which is one of its primary purposes. ...

Infrastructure as Code Infrastructure as code is a method of defining your infrastructure using plain text code which can be checked into a version control system and which an automation tool can read and then provision automatically. The benefit of this system is that infrastructure design is defined in a way that’s easy to understand and rebuild/reproduce automatically, quickly, and upon demand. In this post, we’ll go through setting up a composable infrastructure that I use to manage the services I create. ...

When I was first starting to learn how to build a scalable application, I wanted to make a render farm for Blender animations and so I did. It’s full of TBD’s, but hey! It works and it works well, I’ve used it on many projects. It can be used with preemptible instances on major cloud providers to rip through any rendering you need. Google owns a similar product named Zync, but mine is open source and web based instead of a thick plugin for your 3D software. ...

There are many ways to expose your containers to the outside world, but I’ve yet to come across something as cool as traefik! Whom am I kidding, there’s a lot of options out there that accomplish similar goals, but I found traefik to be the best at integrating them all into one package, and it’s yet to fail me. Throw any reasonable task at it, and traefik adapts - it supports a variety of integrations, what it calls Providers (see docs for all integrations) right out of the box. The reason I love traefik is that it’s a perfect fit as an ambassador for your other containers. ...

False assumptions in distributed computing happen all the time, and they often have high costs. Peter Deutsch asserts that there are at least 7 false assumptions system architects and software developers are likely to make, and James Gosling later added an eighth fallacy. The network is reliable Latency is zero Bandwidth is infinite The network is secure Topology doesn’t change There is one administrator Transport cost is zero The network is homogeneous We’ll look through each one, why it’s relevant when designing and operating any distributed application, and explain what you should genuinely assume (the worst). ...