Microservices: Up and Running

Chapter 6. Building an Infrastructure Pipeline

In this chapter, we’ll establish the foundation for our infrastructure work. We’ll start by setting up an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. Following that, we’ll set up a tool called a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to automate infrastructure changes. With these tools, we’ll be able to define and provision microservices infrastructures throughout the book.

Earlier, in Chapter 2, we established a platform team responsible for delivering the microservices infrastructure. We decided that this team would offer the infrastructure as a service. That meant that other teams should be able to use the infrastructure in a self-service manner, without having to coordinate heavily with the platform team. Enabling the “as a service” model requires some up-front investment. That’s what the tools in this chapter will help address.

In order to reduce the work that our microservices teams need to do, we’ll need to make it easy for teams to move their code from local workstations onto a hosted infrastructure. So we’ll need to lower the barrier for teams to be able to provision environments and deploy their services into a hosted system. We’ll need to make it cheap and easy to create a new environment and provide the right kit to make releases safe and easy.

In practice, achieving those goals is difficult if you don’t have a good way of improving the way you make changes to the infrastructure itself. If we can reduce ...