This article is part of a series on Immutable Infrastructure and discusses the scenario of production release. It may be valuable to review Immutable Infrastructure Basics before reading this article. What is production? At first glance one might expect a straight forward answer to that question like: Any system that directly serves authoritative resources to the intended end user. That might be broad and general enough to capture most situations, but what about A single user’s laptop that is setup to compiler a binary that controls a production machine. Is that laptop considered......
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This article is part of a series on Immutable Infrastructure and discusses the scenario of CI/CD pipelines to deliver high quality software quickly. It may be valuable to review Immutable Infrastructure Basics before reading this article. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, CI/CD, is a practice in software development that aims to ensure high quality updates efficiently progress toward a release. The “Integration” part of CI/CD seeks to confirm that a software change will work with related systems. The divergence of systems that occurs without immutable infrastructure can reduce the effectiveness of CI/CD pipelines.......
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This article is part of a series on Immutable Infrastructure and discusses the scenario of Development Environments and Team Collaboration. It may be valuable to review Immutable Infrastructure Basics before reading this article. Development environments are intended to be flexible and in motion by design. At the same time, teams need to be able to work together and eventually deliver their work to other environments. As teams form and change over time, these objectives are often at odds with each other. The illustration below shows this dynamic at play over time. The above......
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One of the biggest shifts in technology that can be attributed to cloud is the move from away from hand crafting systems to defining systems and letting automation create them. This is often referred to as Infrastructure as Code, and is manifested along a spectrum. Toward the more “cloudy” end of the spectrum is the concept of immutable infrastructure, which means that once created, infrastructure exists in the same state until it is replaced by something new, but it is never changed. Some Examples A good example of immutability is a Java jar......
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Traditional approaches to creating and maintaining workloads in the enterprise often include contributions from many teams and individuals. They also include a combination of manual and scripted activities. I sometimes refer to this as an assembly line. The workloads that come off the assembly line, like cars, have odometers and require regular maintenance. Others refer to these workloads as pets. When moving workloads to the cloud, it’s helpful to visualize how this typically happens on premise and how it will change when going into cloud. The illustration above shows the traditional approach in......
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