Does infrastructure as code pave the way for repeatable, reliable, consistent and testable infrastructure? Join us as we found out.

Kenneth, Kevin & Len are joined by Charlene Tshitoka from ThoughtWorks for a talk about infrastructure as code. Charlene has often gravitated towards the infrastructure of software projects, and after having worked on a distributed devops project she was propelled head first into thinking about infrastructure as code and how that can be leveraged to build more reliable infrastructure.

"Infrastructure as code" is the combination of devops (automation, scaling, consistency) and software development best practices (versioning, modeling, testing, decoupling). Charlene shares from her broad experience of automating and controlling a diverse set of infrastructure with different teams and gives us a lot of good advice on how to think of infrastructure as code, and what the common pitfalls are the teams experience.

This show is light on resources, and packed with fantastic insights and lessons!

(Apologies for the varying audio quality, we experienced various technical difficulties whilst recording)

Follow Charlene Tshitoka online:

- https://twitter.com/charlymul

Here are some resources mentioned during the show:

* Domain Specific Languages (DSL) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language

* Chef - https://www.chef.io/

* Introduction to Chef Audit Mode - http://jtimberman.housepub.org/blog/2015/04/03/chef-audit-mode-introduction/

* Chef audit mode docs - https://docs.chef.io/analytics.html#audit-mode

* Chef Test Kitchen - https://docs.chef.io/kitchen.html

* Learn Chef - https://learn.chef.io/

* Netcat - http://nc110.sourceforge.net/

* Ansible - https://www.ansible.com/

* Jenkins - https://jenkins.io/

* Jenkins Delivery Pipelines - https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Delivery+Pipeline+Plugin

* Jenkins Job Builder - http://docs.openstack.org/infra/jenkins-job-builder/

* Continuous Delivery - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery

* Packer - https://www.packer.io/

* Serverspec - http://serverspec.org/

* Snow flake servers - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/SnowflakeServer.html

* Vagrant - https://www.vagrantup.com/

* Blue-green deployments - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/BlueGreenDeployment.html

* Docker - https://www.docker.com/

* Puppet - https://puppet.com/product/open-source-projects

* GO.CD - https://www.go.cd/

* Bamboo - https://www.atlassian.com/software/bamboo

And finally our picks

Kevin:

* Unit testing - http://martinfowler.com/bliki/UnitTest.html

* Test first - http://www.extremeprogramming.org/rules/testfirst.html

Kenneth:

* AfrikaBurn - http://www.afrikaburn.com/

Charlene:

"Look at your infrastructure as code and give it the same tender love & care as your normal production code."

Thanks for listening!

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