Mod 8: Automating Cloud Resources

What is IaC?

Allows the automation of infrastructure device configuration

What are the 2 approaches to IaC?

Imperative, declarative

What is the difference between the 2 approaches to IaC?

Imperative uses specific commands on the device, declarative is where you outline the desired state and the automation tool matches it

What are some examples of IaC configuration tools? (4)

Ansible, puppet, chef, powershell

What is CaC?

Same as IaC but applies to application configuration

What are some examples of CaC configuration tools? (3)

Ansible, terraform, chef

What is the most common versioning format?

major.minor.patch

What are some important aspects of CI/CD?

Versioning, testing, documentation

What 2 coding formats are typically used for automation in the context of CI/CD?

YAML, JSON

What is CI/CD?

The use of automation to integrate changes into programs

What are some good tasks for automation? (5)

Routine tasks, deployments and updates, scaling, shutdowns and restarts, API creation,

What is orchestration?

Takes a group of automated processes and integrates them into a single workflow, only has to be launched once

What are artifacts?

Results of CI/CD workflow

What is Ansible?

A declarative orchestration tool

What does Ansible use to create its playbooks?

YAML

What is crucial to make Ansible fully automated?

SSH key based authentication

What is kubernetes?

Open source container orchestration utility

What is the ELK stack?

Elasticsearch, logstash, and kibana

What does the ELK stack do?

Provides log aggregation for analysis and visualization

What does elasticsearch, logstash, and kibana do?

elasticsearch is a search and analysis engine, logstash pulls data from systems for elasticsearch, kibana builds charts using info from elasticsearch

What is Grafana?

Data visualization tool for cloud and on prem resources

What is Jenkins?

An open source CI/CD software dev tool

What is terraform?

IaC orchestration tool

What language does terraform use for deploying resources?

HCL

What is a common issue when running Ansible configurations?

Applying configs to the wrong group

What are event driven architectures?

Uses specific triggers to initiate communication between decoupled services and applications

What is the REST architecture style?

Defines design guidelines that enable client server communications

What is the benefits of a REST API?

Conforms to REST guidelines to enable access to HTTP services

What is SOAP?

Simple Object Access Protocol uses XML to access web services

What is RPC?

Remote Procedure Call allows systems to call for code execution in other address spaces

What is WebSockets API?

Similar to REST, allows for 2 way communication

What is GraphQL?

An open source API query language

What makes GraphQL special?

Enables clients to request exactly the info they need