Discovery and tracking of data center resources to enable highly accurate server provisioning and software deployments is a complex problem. The inability to make available resources for use in production in a timely and cost effective manner causes overruns across product and feature life-cycles. Automating discovery, provisioning and orchestration cuts down on delays. This talk presents Genesis, an open source ruby DSL developed at Tumblr. Genesis provides a DSL for resource discovery and is part of an open source stack from Tumblr, alongside Phil (Provisioning) and Collins (Orchestration).
The theme of the talk will be the need for discovery, provisioning and orchestration of physical infrastructure, presenting a non-traditional use case for Ruby. We will cover the DSL developed in Ruby that is part of Genesis. The talk will cover Genesis, from initialization using PXE (PreBoot Execution Environment), to tasks written using the DSL to discover system information.
The talk will cover the history of Tumblr, growth from using PaaS providers to migrating to self owned and operated data centers. The challenges faced in accomplishing the transition and lessons learned from it leading to the need for Genesis (Discovery), Phil (Provisioning) and Collins (Orchestration).
Key takeaways for attendees is exposure to Tumblr's experience of applying Ruby in a non-traditional domain. It will include coverage of datacenter design and operations, attendees can expect to gain an understanding of infrastructure software.
NOTE: Genesis and Phil are not currently open sourced. Genesis will be open-sourced prior to the conference date and Phil at a later time. Collins, on which Genesis relies heavily on is already open-sourced.
