Meta Infrastructure as Code: How Capital One Automated Our Automation Tools with an Immutable Jenkins

Meta Infrastructure as Code: How Capital One Automates our Automation Tools with an Immutable JenkinsGeorge Parris IIIMaster Software Engineer, Retail Bank DevOps @ Capital One

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Why automation is necessary

Our basic principles for success

Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery

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Software development has come a long way!

The rise of –Agile Methodologies–Infrastructure As Code–DevOps Culture

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How Capital One OAO deploys code:

Infrastructure As Code–AWS–Configuration Management–TEST! TEST! TEST!

*IMMUTABILITY

Continuous Integration

Continuous Delivery… Approved and Scheduled Deployments

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And how do we do that?

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Our Basic Principles

–Infrastructure As Code

–Configuration As Code

–Immutability

–Backup and Restore Strategy

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Infrastructure As Code

– Using AWS, everything is Cloud Formation Templates

– Custom tooling to pass variables (now available in CFT)

– Every change is tested

– Easily can spin up environments

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Configuration As Code

– Chef and Ansible

– No central server (Chef Server or Ansible Tower)

– Changes are version controlled

– ”Innersourcing” of changes, such as plugins

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Immutability

– Prevents “special snowflakes” and regressions

– Changes are made in code

– Testing pipelines and code review

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Backup and Restore Strategy

– A backup is only as good as your restore strategy

– Useful for catastrophic event or accidental deletion

– Necessary for new deployments

– Pause the server, save the current state, restore to that state

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Who Watches the Watchmen?

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Continuous Integration: The First Step is TESTING

–Test Your Application Code

–Test Your Configuration Management Code

–Test Your Infrastructure Code

–Test In an Integrated Environment (QA)

–Test After You Launch a New Version to Prod

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Continuous Integration: Second Step is Automating the Testing

–On Pull Request to Application Code

–On Pull Request to Configuration Management Code

–On Pull Request to Infrastructure Code

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And What About Continuous Delivery?

–High confidence in our changes

–How do we deploy a new version of the tool that we usually use to deploy new versions???

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“Mini Jenkins”, the Jenkins Deployer

–Reusability

–Can run our tests

–Can update our stacks

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Other Options

–Bootstrapping

–AWS Lambda

–MultiMaster Active/Active

–AWS CodeDeploy

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Takeaways

–Infrastructure and Config As Code

–Backup and Restore Strategy

–Testing