Automate Cloud Service Deployment across Accounts to Save Admin Time
CAIOS, the Cloud AI Operating System, breaks down barriers to faster, lower-cost development and deployment over the cloud. A feature known as Cross-Account Deployment can deploy any service across multiple cloud accounts in automated fashion, saving significant time. The Team edition of CAIOS, including the Cross-Account feature, is available at no cost.
For this interview, our subject matter expert is Lior Kashti, developer of the Cross-Account Deployment feature. He works at BST LABS, a software engineering unit of BlackSwan Technologies.
Lior, what’s the need being addressed with Cross Account Deployment ?
Let’s say you’re in DevOps or a cloud sysadmin and need to regularly deploy custom cloud services to multiple accounts. You might use multiple accounts to split up resource usage quotas and billing, or for greater security and privacy. Alternatively, you might be a cloud software vendor who wants to automate the delivery of a service to user organizations. A third scenario for Cross-Account Deployment is when you’re moving between environments, such as from staging to production.
Typically, the deployment process is automated but requires building a pipeline with a tool like Jenkins. This could take roughly 2 days of devops work, per pipeline (that is, per service).
What’s the preferred alternative approach?
Using the Cross-Account feature of CAIOS requires only a couple of commands and a few minutes for all the installations to finish.
On the source account, a service’s artifacts and deployment scripts are stored in a repository. Next, all destination accounts are registered as authorized users of the service. This is via a CAIOS command per destination account that enables all the relevant permissions. After that, a single command is issued in each destination account indicating the service name and the repository to pull from:
$ caios service launch <service_name> <source_repository>
As an analogy from the Linux world, this is comparable to remote mounting of a disk from one computer to another.
The Cross-Account approach is equally useful whether you’re deploying software on the cloud the first time, or in an update/upgrade process. When updating a service, you simply drop the code and assets in the repository and redeploy. It happens that AWS has the ability to incrementally upgrade just the changed modules.
How easy is it to use?
Very easy. There’s just a handful of simple CLI commands to use. The key ones are below:
Who is using it?
Most recently, a consulting firm has been using it with a financial services client to deploy a data source fetcher / web scraper. Also, the BST LAB team uses Cross-Account to make it a snap to deploy CAIOS itself on individual customers’ Cloud9 environments. In this respect, we’re serving as a cloud ISV.
Bigger picture, you’ve been working on CAIOS for just several months but find it to be useful cloud infrastructure, correct?
Definitely. I came on board because of the team and the breadth of the CAIOS vision for eliminating barriers to using the cloud. Since then, I’ve found CAIOS to be very easy to use and extend. I told my colleague that “when I first saw CAIOS in action, it felt like magic in terms of cloud productivity. Now that I’ve spent time under the hood and helping to extend its capabilities, it still feels like magic technology.”
BST LABS is making it easier for organizations to realize the full potential of cloud computing through a range of open source and commercial offerings. We are best known for CAIOS, the Cloud AI Operating System, a development platform featuring Infrastructure-from-Code technology. Personal and Team Editions are available at no cost. BST LABS is a software engineering unit of BlackSwan Technologies.
