neurons firing from a keyboard

First, huge shout out to the five of you that actually read stuff from my WordPress blog! You might have noticed that, with the exception of a a few posts for my company, I’ve been mostly silent. I haven’t given up on writing; quite the contrary, in fact! I haven’t run out of neurons to fire either (darn!). I’ve stopped writing on my own site for one reason: I pledged to not write again until I was completely out of WordPress. … »

One of the more interesting types of work we do at Contino is help our clients make sense of the differences between AWS and Microsoft Azure. While the HashiCorp toolchain (Packer, Terraform, Vault, Vagrant, Consul and Nomad) have made provisioning infrastructure a breeze compared to writing hundreds of lines of Python, they almost make achieving a multi-cloud infrastructure deployment seem too easy.

This post will outline some of the differences I’ve observed with using these tools against both cloud platforms. As well, since I used the word “multi-cloud” in my first paragraph, I’ll briefly discuss some general talking points on “things to consider” before embarking on a multi-cloud journey at the end.

I wrote a small Vagrantfile and helper library for provisioning VMware VMs from boxes hosted on Artifactory. I put this together with the intent of helping us easily provision our Rancher/Cattle/Docker-based platform wholesale on our machines to test changes before pushing them up.

Here it is: https://github.com/carlosonunez/vagrant_vmware_artifactory_example

Tests are to be added soon! I’m thinking Cucumber integration tests with unit tests on the helper methods and Vagrantfile correctness.