Speaker
Summary
As Software Engineers(and DevOps and System Engineers) we rely on a stable working platform to deliver and observe our work.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) already helps us orchestrate, provision, and configure our platform in a mostly automated manner (and sometimes it’s even fun!). However, we still need to maintain and update our platform and tools subsequently. And despite the power of IaC, sometimes parts of it break or the whole platform comes down.
How do we prevent the breakdown of our platform and mental health while keeping everything tip-top and up-to-date? Let’s leverage something we’ve been using since almost forever in software engineering: staging environments, continuous integration and, more importantly, testing!
In this talk, we will show you a proof of concept and a demo of how we update our platform using an ephemeral staging environment (using cloud providers), a CI-Server (like Gitlab CI), automated tests (with the Robot Framework) and IaC tools (like Terraform and Ansible). In the demo we will take our configured Grafana, update it and test for its functionality. After the the demo we invite you to philosophize with us about the endless opportunities available to us if we start treating our infrastructure the same way we treat our software.