InfraKit: A toolkit for infrastructure orchestration

Container orchestration has simplified application deployment with common tools across infrastructure providers, but tools for the environment running a container orchestration system tend to be more deeply coupled to cloud providers. Bill Farner and David Chung offer an overview of InfraKit, which provides tools for infrastructure automation of self-healing, self-managing systems.

Container orchestration systems have simplified application deployment and management for developers. However, life is not so simple for operators at the infrastructure level, where tools and patterns tend to be deeply coupled to the infrastructure provider and skills do not translate easily from one provider to another. InfraKit was created to solve this problem by providing a common, portable workflow for automating management of infrastructure. The toolkit provides abstractions and primitives for managing groups of resources, automates management tasks such as scaling of groups of compute instances and rolling updates, and, using a declarative specification of desired infrastructure state, actively monitors and ensures that infrastructure state conforms to this specification. As a result, the underlying infrastructure environment running your container orchestration system and workloads is itself dynamic and resilient. Bill Farner and David Chung discuss the various abstractions and tools in InfraKit that can enable self-healing and self-managing systems and present working examples and use cases to illustrate some key concepts and applications of InfraKit to automate infrastructure management.