Make Onboarding Suck Less

A Spring One 2021 session | slides

Experiments with Docker, Packer and Vagrant. Striving to make it easy for varying persona to get started with a curated collection of tooling packaged and available on popular OSes. All while standing on the shoulders of giants.

Prerequisites

• VirtualBox
  • VirtualBox Extension Pack

    Make sure the version the extension pack you install matches the version of VirtualBox installed on the host machine.

• Vagrant
• Packer
• Docker

For your convenience a set of scripts exist to install the complement of prerequisites listed above on (any of the following host OSes):

• MacOS >= 10.15
• Ubuntu >= 20.04
• Windows >= 10

Tools used to curate toolsets

Vagrant is used to create and start a VM on a host OS. That VM, your choice of MacOS, Ubuntu, or Windows has tools curated for a Kubernetes operator or developer. You could certainly craft other variants. (Use case: get toolset ready for consumption on a laptop or workstation).

Docker is employed along with a Dockerfile to curate the same.

Packer is used to create a VM image that can then be instantiated as a VM in a target public cloud. Examples focus on standing up Ubuntu, but you could very well stand up a Windows VM. (Use case: launch a jumpbox in a Virtual Private Network).

The choice of tools used to package is not the focus rather the above are introduced as a means to curate and automate packaging of toolsets for a typical enterprise persona. Adopting and maintaining automation around curation of toolsets should help make onboarding less of a chore.

Examples

Build your own image

• Vagrant
  • MacOS 10.15
  • Ubuntu 20.04
  • Windows 10
• Docker
  • Ubuntu 21.04
• Packer
  • Ubuntu 20.04 on Google Compute VM
  • Ubuntu 20.04 on Amazon EC2
  • Ubuntu 20.04 on Azure VM
  • Ubuntu 20.04 on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure VM

Other options

• alicloud-image-builder
• ibm-cloud-image-builder
• oci-image-builder
• vmware-vsphere-image-builder

Host your own image repository

Host your own artifact repository within your own network. Mirror or package and maintain artifacts.

A solid choice:

• Artifactory
  • Docker
  • Vagrant

Incorporate scanning to watch for critical security vulnerabilities (and gate consumption of the same).

Consider:

• Snyk
• Tenable

What might you do with these toolset images?

Evaluate:

• Tanzu Community Edition
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid
• Harbor
• Tanzu Build Service
• Tanzu Observability
• Tanzu Service Mesh
• Tanzu Application Platform
• Carvel kapp-controller

CI/CD Ideas

• GitHub Actions
  • setup-packer
  • vagrant-github-actions
• Start GitHub Actions self-hosted runner with VirtualBox and Vagrant
• Using GitLab CI/CD Pipelines to Automate your HashiCorp Packer Builds

Cloud IDEs

• AWS Cloud9
• GitHub Codespaces
• Google Cloud Shell
• Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces