Modern System Administration

Chapter 12. Managing Your Infrastructure

Contemporary computing environments range from managed compute to container orchestrators like Kubernetes with virtualized storage and networking. As discussed in Chapter 11, you can choose a variety of tools to define these critical resources with infracode.

Once, I discovered 11 different active ways of managing parts of the configuration and deployment for a single service. I’d completed an upgrade with a shadow, so I attempted the next upgrade solo. Except, this one process wasn’t automated and depended on a developer-generated package that didn’t exist. So, while I followed the extensive checklist and executed the various shell scripts leveraging the 11 different configuration systems, I had upgraded only part of the thousand-node system, which put the entire system in a precarious state.

It’s not sustainable to manage systems even with a thorough checklist and infracode. This chapter introduces infrastructure models to improve and modernize infrastructure management and provides getting-started recommendations. You can navigate thorny infrastructure scenarios and incrementally adopt more contemporary (and sustainable) practices.

Infrastructure as Code

Let’s start with the more well-known model: infrastructure as code (IaC). IaC is taking time-tested recommended practices from software development and applying them to improve quality and visibility in infrastructure management.

Tip

IaC is all the software development practices applied ...