Today we are plagued by hundreds of choices when architecting a modern data center. Should our machines be virtual or physical? Should we use containers or Docker? Should we use a public cloud provider or a private cloud provider? Which configuration management tool is best to use? What about IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS? It would be manageable if these were binary choices; however, we often find ourselves in a hybrid environment.
As more operations choices are added to your data center, whether through company acquisitions, a growing development team, or general technical debt, managing complexity between legacy and new systems becomes a nightmare. Yet the end goal is still the same — safely deploy your application to your infrastructure. We need to tame our data centers by managing change across systems, enforcing policies, and by establishing a workflow for both developers and operations engineers to build in a collaborative environment.
This talk will discuss the problems faced in the modern data center, and how a set of innovative open source tooling can be used to tame the rising complexity curve. Join me on an adventure with Packer, Consul, and Terraform as we take your data center from chaos to control.