Scaling a conventional on-premise CI infrastructure to

the cloudMikhail Advani

Sebastian CarlierMendix B.V.

Who are we?● Mikhail Advani - Site Reliability Engineer at Mendix

○ Twitter - @mikhail_advani○ Website - https://mikhailadvani.github.io

● Sebastian Carlier - “Devops” Engineer at Mendix○ Twitter - @c4rlier

What were we shipping?

...and how?

Symptoms of the problem● Tight coupling between build jobs and hardware● Periodic housekeeping on servers● Difficulty in upgrading infrastructure● Long feedback loop for builds

Source: https://xkcd.com/303/

Design Goals● Fresh build agents with every run● Immutable infrastructure● Scalable infrastructure● Infrastructure usage overview

Migration Strategy

Infrastructure as Code● Infrastructure

Infrastructure as Code● Infrastructure

○ Amazon Web Services○ Terraform○ Kubernetes via Kops○ RDS

Infrastructure as Code● Infrastructure

○ Amazon Web Services○ Terraform○ Kubernetes via Kops○ RDS

● Configuration management

Infrastructure as Code● Infrastructure

○ Amazon Web Services○ Terraform○ Kubernetes via Kops○ RDS

● Configuration management ○ Packer with Ansible○ Docker

Code Architecture

How do we secure this infrastructure?

What did dynamic scaling ever do for us?

Resource utilization

What really worked for us?

If we were to do this again, what would we change?

Thanks

https://xkcd.com/1629/