Dmitry Kireev

This framework is an attempt to create a convenient way to manage infrastructure as code with a low barrier of entry for the runner.

The idea is to use GNU Make as a vehicle for wrapping the complexity and presenting a nice runner experience.

This way, a coherent set of commands can be used locally or on the CI, as simple as "make deploy."

I’m an adept of a Credo of Phoenix approach when we talk about infrastructure design: Whatever you build should have an ability to be rebuilt with no-to-minimal effort over and over again by anyone or anything with sufficient permissions.

While such a poetic way of calling Idempotent Infrastructure has many important technical characteristics, this time, I’d like to talk about the other side of it: “anyone or anything with sufficient permissions” - runners and their experience.

There is no doubt we’ve all heard of a term “bottleneck”: A bottleneck is one process in a chain of processes, such that its limited capacity reduces the capacity of the whole chain ( Wiki).

Generally speaking, it is required to have multiple humans to run a larger business to perform ideation, design, project management, development, QA, marketing and infrastructure operations. When a single human limits a capacity of a team it becomes a Human Bottleneck.

In this post I’d like to highlight two distinct types of Human Bottlenecks, which both can make a negative impact on the productivity of the team from the prospective of Operations and Site Reliability.

This image incorporates OpenVPN Access Server with Duo Security 2 factor auth. All configuration is done via environment variables, for example: OPENVPN_VPN__DAEMON__0__LISTEN__IP_ADDRESS is mapped to vpn.daemon.0.listen.ip.address, which is searched in present configuration files (as.conf and config.json), which is set to a value of an env var.

Duo Security is optional but is highly recommended, since basic account is free. All you need to do is get API credentials and enable post-auth script.

WImaging is a set of scripts to prepare WIM images and templates for Foreman to provision Windows hosts. Most of the time, official Microsoft deployment tools are used—mostly dism.exe.

All relevant configuration files like unattend.xml are rendered by Foreman and downloaded at build time.