Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the paradigm shift has given birth to a concept which treats Infrastructure
management as Code. This transition, from traditional server maintenance to
automation, would make the building and maintaining a modern infrastructure
environment look more like maintaining a software project.
Using cloud management tools gives an edge over traditional methods in a sense
that they are agile, modular and customizable. This need of managing the
infrastructure and automating the provisioning process has made the users to look for
a solution which could be perceived as a software module. Cloud management tools
such as Chef and Puppet are open source scripting based management tools. These
scripts are idempotent, cross platform and modular which makes them a reliable to
use.
Various cloud management tools are compared and discussed in following sections
[Ref Table 1]. Recommendations based on predefined parameters are also provided.
3
Recommendations
3.1
Manageability
•
Script the image configuration process
Scripting the instance configuration process gives an edge over manual
configuration process in an ever changing environment (refer the RHEL case
discussed above). It's easier to modify a piece of code than repeating the manual
process right from the scratch.
3.2
Configurability
•
Assigning a role to an instance on the fly
It's always good to use the base image for instance creation and configure that
instance, by assigning it a role, on the fly. This reduces the burden of maintaining
the bunch of images. Any changes that are to be made would have to be
incorporated in the base image.
3.3
Maintainability
•
Usage of cloud management tools
Puppet and Chef are two such cloud management tools which offers
infrastructure automation. They provide a framework to automate system admin
tasks. There are certain benefits of using scripting tools to set up the
infrastructure against traditional, manual method. The advantages are as follows:
a)
Easier to maintain.
b)
No scope for errors inflicted by human intervention.
c)
Same scripts could be used in traditional datacenter.
d)
No vendors lock-in as far as cloud vendors are concerned.
e)
Scripts are idempotent, cross platform and modular.
