Server Orchestration - Automating your Server Workflow – A How To

Abstract:

We know you’ve automated spinning up new servers as well as configuring those servers with your applications. You are well versed with AWS, Chef, Puppet, and the like. But, what about those manual admin tasks that happen after your servers are up and configured. What about multi-step operational tasks to make sure that your databases are operating properly, that you’ve indexed everything properly, or manipulated data for analysis? What about making sure that based on your log files you are taking the right steps to optimize your servers? Server orchestration takes many forms for each organization and largely these tasks in the cloud have been done manually. Sure some people script a step or two, but when it comes to scripting a whole workflow, that ends up being far more challenging.

In this talk, we’ll show you how to automate after Chef and Puppet. We’ll show you ways that you can orchestrate with open source tools and give you options on other approaches. We’ll walk through a few examples of how organizations are orchestration critical tasks and provide the code. Tasks such as running database backups, post-processing data, securing your infrastructure based on attacks, getting a list of all cron jobs on all servers simply and easily, and a few others. Further, we’ll show you how to product logs and data that you can use to track down what’s happened in your environment and for compliance. We’ll take a look at open source tools such as Jenkins, Luigi, RunDeck, and others to see how they can help you automate your server management tasks.

Speaker: Topher Marie