Building Images for GCP

Sun, 20 Oct 2019 04:00:00 +0000

In my last post, I opened with the fact that my company has decided to dive into the world of GCP to get ahead of most of the market in our space. With a few of us being tasked for this initive, I decided to take it upon myself to look into Packer. The goal would be to roll our homebrewed software/OS image into an automated build process to make images in GCP (or AWS, vSphere, etc.).

Vault Journey

Wed, 11 Sep 2019 04:00:00 +0000

Being a good SysAdmin requires some sense of laziness. In the spirit of that approach, I’ve spent some time looking into Hashicorp’s Terraform and Red Hat’s Ansible tools in my organization’s route to Google Cloud Platform. I wanted a method to create reproducible Compute Engine VMs that would allow us to easily create multiple hosts with minor changes quickly and easily.

I decided that with the use of Terraform, Vault (also from Hashicorp) would allow me to templatize the configs, as well as, create secrets/passwords that would be randomized, able to be called at will, and even automatically rolled with a configured frequency.

DevOps on Cliff Hults

Building Images for GCP

Vault Journey