Last week, I was in Vancouver for MacDevOpsYVR. I highly recommend watching the conference talks when they are posted online.
YVR does quick talks that are designed to be super focused and an easy way to share some information. This year I decided to share a method for creating a complete munki infrastructure in AWS, based on code I’m using in production. Many companies are using AWS for their setup but I felt no one was painting the full picture, which was my goal.
The result was a terraform-munki module that is now open source and an awful talk on my part. It’s okay to fail and I strongly believe I learn more from my failures than success. So the overarching topic I learned was a live demo that requires an internet connection has many ways it can fail. A few ideas I’ll remember for the future:
- Have a backup plan
- Have pre-recorded videos as a fallback
- Pre-load all web pages in separate tabs
- Have a small text file with all commands you plan on using. This allows you to copy/paste complex commands and a fallback in case you get lost.
With all that said I still want to share a quick demo to walk-through some of the code and explain some key pieces.
I’ve designed this code to be as flexible as possible but, I might have overlooked something so please reach out if you run into an issue. The goal of this project is to allow users to get started quickly and have sane defaults.
Once you get a handle on the basics you can work on advanced topics like CloudFront-Middleware, automatically uploading your munki repo to s3 from git, add alerts on lambda failures, etc.