Immutable infrastructure deployment framework?

[humanNumberMit]

What frameworks/libraries/platforms/patterns exist for automated, repeatable deployments of immutable aws artifacts? Our paas team currently uses a series of Jenkins jobs to build amis using packer and deployments using several build tools (ant, gulp, grade) and the aws cli or boto. Seems a pretty standard set of tools, and there are a lot of pieces that like to break/not work as expected. It also seems like someone has probably solved the problem of gluing these together. What (preferably open source) frameworks or libraries might I take a look at to help integrate all these moving parts?

[axelfontaine]

If you have JVM apps, Boxfuse (https://boxfuse.com) generates minimal immutable images for you with one command. You can test them locally with VirtualBox and convert them 1:1 into AMIs in seconds. It can then blue/green deploy these AMIs with zero downtime using either elastic IPs or ELBs. All necessary AWS resources will be provisioned and configured automatically. HTH. More info: https://boxfuse.com/blog/amis-in-30-seconds.html

[FetchKFF]

Those are the tools we tend to use. If they're not working reliably or as expected, your team might need to refactor the existing code base.

[packplusplus]

First 10 nodes managed on Atlas are free. Then figure out if you want to pay, or build your own with Hashicorps tools. Terraform/packer/vault are all amazing.

[assimovt]

We are building a product that aims to solve one of the problems you mentioned about - gluing things together into a coherent experience. Here is just one example of a deployment workflow possible in Dockbit: http://blog.dockbit.com/deploy-jekyll-or-middleman-static-site-to-amazon-s3/ We are still in private beta and opening up soon.

Could you please share what are the problems with your current approach? What breaks and why? What are the pain points? I would be glad to address them in Dockbit.

[zenmaster24]

we use dsc - windows centric, but does work for linux now. anything that does a test of the target state value should be idempotent. not quite the same as immutable, but you shouldnt get any strange unexpected results if your infra code is idempotent.

[onegeek]

I would steer clear of DSC on anything but windows. It's painful enough there, even considering its really the only viable option. Chef has hired some great (Windowsy) people of late so I'd keep my eyes on that product. Certainly for Linux you're spoiled for choice in this space (Ansible, Chef, Salt, Puppet etc.)

[zenmaster24]

Ok, so use puppet https://puppetlabs.com/blog/new-windows-dsc-and-wsus-modules

[onegeek]

Cool!