After talking with John Willis of Chef/OpsCode at Ohio Linux Fest (I taught an intro class on Cfengine 3), I finally started to get Infrastructure As code.
Am immensely excited to try it out. My first project is to ephemerize the Web/App server tier in a staging environment – instead of rolling out a new version of the application, I will roll out a new VM, completely configured by Cfengine, and the new application, also installed by Cfengine.
The idea is, I will throw away the VM after the testing is complete. I will be sure that my Cfengine config is complete with no additional manual steps required to deploy a working version of the app.
The next step will be doing the same in production.
Bye bye being tied to a physical server. Hello virtualization and poof! pop! short-lived VM’s.
Vertical Sysadmin, Inc. 