Philipp Krenn

You want to automate your AWS infrastructure, the provisioning of instances, and your deployments?

Then Ansible is the right tool for you and this workshop gets you up and running in no time.

Three years ago we started using AWS by clicking the infrastructure together. Over the time we built various scripts to support us, but this just worked like duck tape holding a broken system together. So when we had to migrate from Ireland to Frankfurt, we took the chance to start fresh. We looked for a single tool to do everything for us and it turned out that Ansible was the perfect match.

In the workshop we cover the basics of Ansible by setting up a local environment in Vagrant. And we create a similar system on AWS and cover the initial stumbling blocks.
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In this talk, we’ll go through our deployment sins and how to avoid them:

• Lust: Of course I’m using Docker, microservices, and every latest trend for each and every project!
• Gluttony: I absolutely need this monolithic, 500MB archive file.
• Greed: I’m not kidding when I’m saying that this app will be at least 150MB and only works with JBoss AS 6.0.
• Sloth: Continuous Deployment or Delivery — who would need that?!
• Wrath: Graceful error handling, reporting, and monitoring are for the faint of heart!
• Envy: Why would I rely on an external system to do the whole configuration for me, when I can lovingly handcraft it all myself?
• Pride: Checking our app’s status after the deployment? That’s only for people who break stuff.

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Have you ever struggled with the object-relational impedance mismatch? Since relations don’t match object-orientated data-structures cleanly, this is a recurring problem. Documents are a much better fit and remove a lot of the mapping pain to make database interactions fun again.

In this talk, we explore how Elasticsearch stores and interacts with JSON documents. Additionally, we take a coding tour through the painless interaction from Java with Spring Data Elasticsearch on how to annotate and query data. The talk concludes with some tips and lessons learned, so you can get up and running in no time.
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But it doesn’t have to be! This talk gives an overview on how to monitor Spring Boot applications, since they are increasingly popular for building microservices. We dive into:

• System metrics: Keep track of network traffic and system load.
• Application logs: Collect and parse your logs.
• Application metrics: Get the information from Boot’s metric and health endpoints and store it.
• Request tracing: Use Sleuth to trace requests through a distributed system.
• Uptime monitoring: Use Heartbeat to ping services and actively monitor their availability.

All the data will be aggregated and visualized in Kibana. So you will learn how to collect and centralize data from your distributed application and then visualize it in its entirety — giving you an all around view of your system.

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The NoSQL ecosystem thrived on combining scalability and simplicity. That often meant taking short cuts around security and this legacy is still haunting many products. This talk uses Elasticsearch as an example and covers both the technical background as well as anecdotal evidence of past incidents. Finally, we also discuss current and future steps to get ahead of the curve while impacting the ease of use as little as possible.

The following are some assumptions, which helped the ease of use initially, but turned out to be less than perfect for security in the long run:

• Binding to all interfaces and broadcasting join requests to the whole subnet makes clustering incredibly simple.
• Running as root is the straight forward option.
• Using a general purpose programming language inside a datastore easily adds lots of features.
• Nobody would run ransomware against a NoSQL system.
• Guessing the content-type of a request is fine.
• Default passwords and cleartext password files are a reasonable tradeoff.
• Docker plays well with your security efforts.
• Security will not break your upgrade.