Nine Questions to Build Great Infrastructure Automation Pipelines

Explore the essential components of building effective infrastructure automation pipelines in this 27-minute conference talk from SREcon21. Delve into nine crucial questions that transform automation into modular, portal, and continuous infrastructure delivery pipelines. Learn why CI/CD pipelines struggle with infrastructure understanding, the differences between pipeline flow and orchestration, and the importance of focusing on intents rather than chained actions. Discover the distinctions between provisioning and configuration, methods for sharing state between tools, and the significance of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in pipeline development. Gain insights on reusing and sharing automation parts, overcoming obstacles in implementation, and understanding the concept of Standardized Infrastructure Pipelines. Conclude with five key strategies to enhance your infrastructure pipeline construction skills.

Syllabus

Intro
Why doesn't my CI/CD pipeline understand infrastructure?
Why is a "Pipeline Flow" different than other Orchestration
Why focus on Intents instead of the chained actions?
Why are provisioning and configuration so different?
Why can't I share state between tools?
Why can't I ignore what is between pipeline flows?
Why is lac central to Infrastructure Pipelines?
Why is it so hard to reuse and share automation parts?
What is holding us back from doing this work?!
What is a Standardized Infrastructure Pipeline? Infrastructure Service
Five things that can help you build Infrastructure Pipelines.