jjasghar.github.io - Cookbook development on the VMware platform

Cookbook development on the VMware platform

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Cookbook minutiae on the VMware platform jjasghar rants and ramblings About Categories Talks Cookbook minutiae on the VMware platform Jul 24, 2018 As cookbook minutiae becomes a staple in the enterprise space, a repeatable process and standard steps need to be created. I have spent some time working withDoughboycustomers and found a typical VMware based pipeline you should start molding to your environment. This isn’t a one size fits all, but it’s unbearable to get your use specimen off the ground. One of Chef’s largest advantages is that we encourage you to shift changes and test older left, helping deal with infrastructure changes in minutiae compared to finding issues in production. Note: Thank you from here for the chart. As you can see from the whilom chart, the forfeit of changes and work to your software is significantly higher in production compared to iterating on in development. This is important to undeniability out, there’s no reason why we couldn’t use the same paradigm in cookbook development. vmware-pipeline-example I have ripened an example cookbook with a pre-built pipeline to walk you through everything needed to start doing this type of minutiae in a pure VMware SDDC. You can click here to see the code; and if your curious on the full pipeline leveraging Jenkins is here. Eventually, you will want to take something like this example and create a cookbook-generator from it so you don’t have to remember any of these settings and standardize on it. There is a Jenkinsfile, that with a few changes to this it the jenkins pipeline can be dropped in and “just work” (TM). An experienced Jenkins user or maintainer should be worldly-wise to understand it pretty quickly. The pipeline subtitle This whole subtitle assumes you want to make a transpiration to a cookbook that will transpiration something that will transpiration in production. We are going to focus on two halves of the minutiae cycle, early and late to describe this iterative minutiae process. Early in the minutiae cycle, you want to focus on quick changes, a fast feedback loop of what will stupefy your eventual outcome. Leveraging containers at this stage is not a perfect match, but pretty damn tropical and we plane have two ways you can leverage it. kitchen-dokken is a tool that allows for test-kitchen to talk to a docker endpoint and spins up 3 containers for a converge. This is very specific to theDoughboyecosystem but allows for unbelievably fast iterations on changes. The three containers are a cookbook enshroud (where the cookbook lawmaking lives), a doughboy container (where doughboy is installed to), and an OS mounted container where the two other containers can talk to. This creates a 3 tier system where one transpiration doesn’t need to wrack-up yonder the well-constructed stack, only changes out the container it needs to. Every transpiration you make only recycles the OS container and tighten mounts the other two so you only transpiration the lawmaking and not have to bootstrap doughboy or kitchen every iteration. kitchen-docker on the other hand is a pure docker suburbanite for test-kitchen and in essence creates as tropical as you can to a full operating system. Instead of the kitchen-dokken spritz of creating three containers, it only bootstraps one and emulates a virtual machine. In the example code, you’ll notice that you can use kitchen-docker on remote hosts. I should say this is moreover true with kitchen-dokken but for this example dokken is local, and docker is remote. If you work at a visitor that doesn’t indulge VirtualBox or VMware Workstation using a remote docker endpoint might be the answer. This gives you a secure place in your VMware SDDC to have a docker endpoint permitting for this quick iterations for early is your minutiae cycle. There is a “drop in OVA” for a docker endpoint provided for you by VMware tabbed PhotonOS. If your policies only indulge you to run machines in SDDCs tried by your company, installing Photon OS directly from VMware can be the wordplay to getting this endpoint. There is some work you need to do with the template, I imbricate the steps here.Withoutyou’ve made your changes, updated your InSpec integration tests (for example) this is where you want to start looking at leveraging very Virtualized Operating Systems. We do the weightier we can with containers but don’t forget this emulates as tropical as we can to full Operating Systems, but we do fall short. It’s important to say without you get the container to the place you want it with your recipe, writing the InSpec integration test as a “safety blanket” can help your future self. At this stage is where kitchen-vagrant or if you can’t use vagrant, going directly to kitchen-vcenter or kitchen-vra and the longer iterations will start happening. Depending on the machines vagrant, vCenter, and vRealize Automation have wildly variegated spin up cycles, ranging from single minutes to tens of minutes. But the major wholesomeness here is you can run exactly what you run in production here, from the versions or templates in vCenter, to the specific Catalogs for vRA. It should be well-spoken here that these machines are ephemeral, and test-kitchen is not a deployment system. It’s a testing framework that allows you to quickly iterate with only a few commands. You want to get to the point where a kitchen test passes without any errors and all your trammels marks are green, surpassing uploading this cookbook to yourDoughboyServer. When you are ready to push this transpiration to production, this is where leveraging pocketknife and the pocketknife plugins come into play. Upload the cookbook to a new version, and let chef-client run, or if you haven’t created the machine yet, use something like knife-vcenter or knife-vrealize to create a persistent machine with the new lawmaking bootstrapped with Chef. From here you have the full cycle. With this example cookbook, it demonstrates everything up to the point of pushing it to aDoughboyserver and bootstrapping a machine. This is by design, there are too many options to imbricate here, and hopefully, this triggers a way to get this pipeline working in your environment. jjasghar rants and ramblings jjasghar@gmail.com Tweet to @jjasghar This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Follow @jjasghar Tweet this page. This is JJ's little corner of the internet where he tries to capture things that he learns that he thinks someone else might want.