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It’s an interesting time to be working in the IT industry. We don’t deliver software to our customers by installing a program on a single machine and calling it a day.¹ Instead, we are all slowly turning into system engineers.

We now deploy software applications by stringing together services that run on a distributed set of computing resources and communicate over different networking protocols. A typical application can include web servers, application servers, memory-based caching systems, task queues, message queues, SQL databases, NoSQL datastores, and load balancers.

We also need to make sure we have the appropriate redundancies in place, so that when failures happen (and they will), our software systems will handle these failures gracefully. Then there are the secondary services that we also need to deploy and maintain, such as logging, monitoring, and analytics, as well as third-party services we need to interact with, such as infrastructure-as-a-service endpoints for managing virtual machine instances.²

You can wire up these services by hand: spinning up the servers you need, SSHing to each one, installing packages, editing config files, and so forth, but it’s a pain. It’s time-consuming, error-prone, and just plain dull to do this kind of work manually, especially around the third or fourth time. And for more complex tasks, like standing up an OpenStack cloud inside your application, doing it by hand is madness. There’s a better way.

If you’re ...