Michael Shogren's Blog

Now that I have a virtual machine I can access via SSH I need to make sure it has the software I intend to use. This software needs to be installed in a repeatable manner so I can create and destroy the virtual machine fairly regularly if I need to. I have decided to make use of Ansible for automating infrastructure configuration. I briefly considered Chef, Puppet and Salt but decided to go with Ansible because it does not require installing any agent software on the infrastructure targets. On the other hand I hear that Ansible may be slow for use with more machines in a large scale infrastructure so I may revisit Salt in the future.

Next I want create another user and grant it the least privilege it needs in order to launch a new virtual machine from the command line. This will enable me to ensure that the only access keys I have to keep my local machine will only be able to start a new VM. This should prevent any issues with someone else using my machine to use other AWS services. So once I am done this step should delete the access keys for my admin user from the IAM console.

One of the tenets of continuous delivery is to always automate, and that includes automating the creation of one of the first things anyone working on the ALSL project will need, a development environment. There is an obvious bootstrapping problem here, in that to setup anything in an automated way I need a first environment from which to create others. Ideally this initial environment can be ignored after the bootstrapping process is done. In my case the initial environment is an HTPC I bought over 6 years ago that is running Debian Stretch. I can remote to that computer over SSH from a couple of Android devices I have including a tablet with a bluetooth keyboard. Alternatively I can plug a keyboard directly into that HTPC and use the TV as a monitor. The point I am trying to make is that ALSL is not investing in new hardware right now.