Infrastructure as Code: "pip install" your environment

Continuous Delivery, DevOps, Lean - all those movements have one thing in common: extending the process of software development along the whole value stream, ultimately to the customer. This simple requirement causes surprising serious difficulties on traditional operations workflows. All of a sudden, a single manual ticket to the operations team is a critical blocker in the delivery process. Therefore all parts of the infrastructure, storage, databases, identities, compute resources must be provided as a self service for the developers in order to be able to achieve this goal. What one may call “the cloud” (including self hosted ones like open stack) is such a successful model not least because they offer exactly this “ticket-less” self-service. But why should we wait for “the cloud” to offer what we really need? We are python developers, we are hackers!

In this talk I will show how to build your own infrastructure-as-a-service on the example of “Postgraas”, an open source postgres-as-a-service I wrote in python just for fun. With a simple curl request you can get your very own database, just like RDS on AWS. You will learn how easy it is to create such a remarkably useful service with hardly three hundred lines of flask, docker and some glue-code, a project for a rainy Sunday. After the talk you will know how to amaze your colleagues by eliminating an annoying ticket or manual workflow with a simple flask app and some creativity.