In my current role, we’ve embarked upon a transformation journey; From Your traditional Virtual Machines and a heavy dose of configuration management with the help of almighty Ansible to Cloud.

Selection of such appropriate ‘cloud’ has been a topic of discussion for some while, and to the point, — the keen plan was to avoid the classic ‘Lift-and-Shift’ — so-called ‘Best Practice’ recommendation, to mere facilitate this migration journey into cloud infrastructure, but rather embrace cloud offering natively, -and go full-steam into Kubernetes YAML definition engineering our infrastructure as-a-code, from get go. (Thank you Weave Flux GitOps tooling)

But what changed? How does it glue together? And what’s the difference in the setup? — are the questions many still rightly ask. So, let’s explain the setup, like you’re a 10-year old.

I intend to outline the high-level view engineering the solution the the same requirements, via different methods, albeit with all the working code snippets — which you can copy&paste and run in your own Google Project.

Let’s call this ‘Compare and Contrast’ objective between implementation of a technical solution in two distinct methods of implementation.

The Main Requirement:

• We want to deploy a simple “Hello” Nginx App, serving on HTTP(80) and HTTPS(443)
• We want it secure. Let’s talk hardening.
• OS choice. Does it matter?
• Cloud Platform: Google Cloud, but of course.

#ansible #docker #nginx #kubernetes #configuration-management