Miniconf on Cloud Server Management (Mumbai)

Everyone knows automation in operations is necessary, and is a key objective of any DevOps practice. But if not started on the right foot, or with the right objective in mind, can often leads to false starts and bad design choices. Building and extending to incorporate new requirements gets increasingly difficult leading to hacks and rewrites.

At Helpshift we follow certain principles and guidelines that have helped us avoid these pitfalls, and allow us to build a stable and extensible automations framework using Ansible.

I will walk through these principles, the thought process behind them, and the results through demos.

Outline

• How to approach automation requirements, and principles to follow - using “Workflows”
• Using ansible to implement these principles - configuration, orchestration and infrastructure
• Thinking like a programmer - building abstractions and interfaces
• Wrap up with the benefits, and how to optimize resources
• Q & A

Requirements

The talk is targeted at experienced folks in operations. Should have basic understanding of configuration management systems, and operations in general. We use ansible, so knowing that would also be a plus.

Speaker bio

Production engineering manager at Helpshift. Leading a team responsible for the Helpshift infrastructure; doing Operations, Systems Architecture, Performance engineering, etc

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/rags/automation-principles-at-helpshift