PhoneGap Infrastructure

Provision and configure different kinds of infrastructure in an automated fashion

Why?

Sometimes, we need servers to power our services and tools. Setting up servers boils down to two parts: set up a machine to act as the server, and configure it so it functions properly. Cloud providers give us an easy way to handle managing the physical realities of running a server, and configuration management gives us an automated way to reproduce the server's software, libraries and configuration. Combining these two together gives us a fast and powerful way of managing our servers, and gives us the ability to reproduce and trace our infrastructure.

Requirements

• Ansible installed, at least version 2.1, but preferably 2.2.
• Private keys for accessing specific AWS instances
• Highly recommended to read through the Ansible Introduction. In addition, Ansible's concept of Playbooks (a collection of tasks defining the desired final state of a machine), is particularly recommended.

Overview

Technology Used

• AWS as a cloud provider, handling the physical realities of our servers for us.
• Ansible as the main tool to interact with AWS as well as configure machines to reach a specific and consistent state. Ansible uses SSH to communicate with machines, and, when used appropriately, guarantees idempotency, or, put more simply: running a set of ansible commands against a machine one or more times always leaves the machine in a single consistent state. No more sudo apt-get install mysql and zero-fucks-given sysadmining.

Repository Structure

The subdirectories in this repository contain sets of Ansible Playbooks and documentation to manage specific kinds of infrastructure. So far:

• graylog-ec2: A Graylog-powered data storage and analytics server running on EC2, powering https://metrics.phonegap.com.