Why Your Start-up Needs an Automated Infrastructure

Providing efficient, automated operations is critical to new startups. In this session, we will show one method of building an automated infrastructure by presenting a live demonstration company in EC2. First we will cover all of the components necessary for any automated infrastructure to be successful:

1. Operating System Installation: Having a consistent, repeatable operating system install.
2. DNS: Having a reliable, up to date, standardized naming scheme.
3. System Inventory and Classification (iClassify): Centralized, query-able information about the entire infrastructure.
4. Version Control: The heart of the infrastructure. You should be able to rebuild from scratch with nothing but a recent checkout.
5. Configuration Management (Puppet): No more manual configuration.
6. Identity Management (LDAP): Consistent authentication and authorization for every internal service and application.
7. Monitoring: Fully automated, always up to date, automated monitoring.
8. Trending: The data you need on how your infrastructure is performing.
9. Application Deployment: How the automated infrastructure paves the way for an ideal application deployment mechanism.

Then we will present a series of use-cases, walking the audience through how each component interacts to help them solve real-world problems. Sample use cases are adding a new application server and application troubleshooting.

All the tools presented will be open source, and we’ll make sure that attendees have a handout detailing each of them (and a workflow of how they fit together).