Journey to the Cloud with Packer and Terraform

Nadeem Ahmad, Software Engineer at Box
Engineering teams that have run their services traditionally on long-running bare-metal servers can find the task in migrating to a more modern, dynamic, and elastic cloud-based infrastructure very daunting.
Well, in just over a year, the Productivity Engineering team at Box, accomplished just that!
The Productivity Engineering team at Box has a mission to enable other engineers to be more productive and owns the continuous integration (CI) pipeline (services and infrastructure). Historically, we ran our infrastructure on single-purpose, long-running bare-metal nodes. There were multiple problems that arose from this approach, but being a CI team, the issue of host divergence resulting in test failures seen on one node and not another, was the standout problem for us and other engineers at the company.
With the aid of HashiCorp’s excellent tools, Packer and Terraform, we have successfully moved our entire infrastructure from bare-metal servers to a hybrid cloud consisting of OpenStack and AWS. Due to this substantial milestone, we are now able to tear down and bring up our infrastructure very quickly, which was unimaginable in the bare-metal world.
There were many challenges we faced along the way, along with learning some very valuable lessons. This talk will discuss those challenges, the solutions we came up with to solve those challenges, and share the lessons we learned. The talk will detail how instrumental Packer & Terraform were to our journey. The session also covers some of the tools and user-friendly abstractions we built on top of Packer & Terraform, which allowed us to obtain even further value from them. --
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HashiCorp is the leader in multi-cloud infrastructure automation software. The HashiCorp software suite enables organizations to adopt consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. HashiCorp open source tools Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Boundary, and Waypoint are downloaded tens of millions of times each year and are broadly adopted by the Global 2000. Enterprise versions of these products enhance the open source tools with features that promote collaboration, operations, governance, and multi-data center functionality.
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