Just Another IT Blog

It's time to share some of my experiences, crazy ideas, tips and tricks !!!

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Cloud Assembly is the fundamental stone of the Cloud Automation Services, CAS, based on a declarative infrastructure as code model you specify the applications and services you are willing to provide for end-users consumption, called Blueprint.
If you are used to vRealize Automation (vRA), you will see a remarkable resemblance between them.
 
Based on the same canvas concept as vRA, you can drag objects like, machines, networks, volumes, load balancers, etc… to form the desired state of your service.

But along with the drag and drop functionality, Cloud Assembly has evolved to be more developer-friendly, allowing you to declare your desired state on a YAML format, just like any good infrastructure as code tool.
As you are typing the visual view will reflect the changes automatically and vice versa.


The news won't stop here, version control is also integrated within the platform, enabling you to check and compare what has changed from version to version, allowing a quick troubleshoot in case if something goes wrong or even rolling back versions.


You might be wondering, not all services are statics sometime users need to provide information to fulfill the provisioning, like OS images, t-shirt size (small, medium, large), etc.
Cloud Assembly provides this functionality through the use of “inputs”:
This way you can prompt end users for the information required to provide a service.


The way inputs work is; 
specify on the inputs section and the reference it latter on the resources section using ${inputs.”name”} sintax
There are dozens of patterns you can apply to inputs, just check it out for a comprehensive list.

It’s not all if you need specific cloud services like AWS services, S3 buckets, Route53, RDS Clusters, Lambda functions, Azure Machines or SQL Databases and much more, it’s all available within the canvas, just drag the component and configure it.


One last thing, many companies have implemented a DevOps culture, where developers are using CI/CD tools and committing code changes to a repository. You probably want to leverage the same methodology to your blueprints, NOT A PROBLEM, Cloud Assembly can also integrates with your Git repository and get the latest committed changes.
How cool is that ?!?

 
Next post I’ll cover how to control the placement of your services, stay tune

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