How is infrastructure as code used?
The wall we used to showcase infrastructure as code architecture is basically a giant LCD screen made up off RGB-lit keyboards on which we can control the individual LED’s using software to showcase cool moving images.
The wall is a fun project run wild that thought us a lot about infrastructure as code.
What we learned from ‘The Wall’
We were building a giant keyboard-backlit-powered wall-type of Raspberry Pi monstrosity just out of curiosity— and we had to deploy the software on the Raspberry Pi’s manually.
This means that every time we had to make an update to our custom software that was running on the Pi’s, we had to manually install every bit of it. A tedious job, indeed, which we understandably hated very much.
By tinkering with various software tools, we managed as a team to make it easier to play around with this monstrosity, and we managed to learn a lot about Nomad Clusters by HashiCorp.
Therefore the Wall showcases what HashiCorp tooling can do for you. In our fun-project “The Wall”, we used Nomad for the runtime, Consul for connecting the services and we used Packer for creating the images.
Why we used HashiCorp tooling
At first, Ansible was used to automate software deployment. But because we continuously break apart The Wall for showcasing purposes, the Raspberry pi’s behind the keyboards tend to break sometimes (– we should be more careful :/).
Each time a Pi broke, we had to find a new one, build and install the software on the new Pi for it to work, which can be a problem when no internet connection is available at the venue…
Using HashiCorp tooling, we could have a client listen to its server merely by plugging it into the network.
We had a visit from HashiCorp
The guys from HashiCorp came to visit the OnTheSpot release engineers and had the following to say:
“The wall is a beautiful and fun way to make tangible what immutable infrastructure can mean when using HashiCorp tooling.” — Mark Van Der Zijden — Enterprise Sales Director HashiCorp Benelux
Infrastructure as code in the future
We believe that infrastructure as code has serious potential. Want to know more about it?
Let us know in the comments below what you want to learn next.
