Hey admins! I'm curious about whether your organizations hold onto any permanent or 'pet' resources in your infrastructure, or is everything dynamically provisioned? I'm diving into Terraform and trying to figure out how to define and provision entire environments. I feel like I'll need some pre-existing infrastructure to kick things off. I'm planning for an as minimal setup as possible before I start—at the very least, I think a storage system for persistent data is essential for managing those temporary hosts, as well as a server to handle their provisioning like a satellite or foreman server. Are there any other resources you think are important to keep around? Maybe monitoring and logging tools? I'd love your thoughts as I'm keen to get better at this! Thanks for taking the time to read my query.
5 Answers
We’ve got some roaches in our setup, unfortunately. I know, not ideal! But I’m curious if they’re the wood roaches, haha.
In our setup, we keep several pet resources. We treat our Kubernetes nodes as cattle while having some databases and other services as pets. For certain situations, especially with data stores, having a pets approach makes a lot of sense. We make sure to provision these pets with Terraform and Ansible, keeping everything tracked for scaling or changes.
Honestly, everything feels like a pet in our setup. We’ve just embraced that for now.
We usually have a few pets around; for instance, our boss sometimes brings his dog to the office. Plus, we’ve got a couple of stray rabbits in the backyard and an occasional cat that comes to hunt those rabbits!
Bootstrapping a new environment can be tricky! I did it back in 2014 with Puppet and Foreman on VMware. Right now, we’re moving our AWS architecture to be more account-specific, and there's a lot to learn. It feels easier to just click and deploy, but we're committed to building it correctly this time. Our only actual 'pets' in this structure are a couple of EBS volumes that we need for our DB team's bastion script.
Haha, let’s hope they’re the harmless kind!