One of the key focuses of Cloud Assembly is enabling Cloud Administrators, Dev’s, and SRE’s the ability to create blueprints for deploying common services across multiple clouds. These blueprints could be as simple as deploying an S3 bucket in AWS or as complex as deploying an N-Tier architecture application with vSphere. There are few things more frustrating than toiling away at crafting your perfect deployment blueprint, only to fire it off and have it throw an alert that it’s failed.
Fear not! We’ve taken steps to help reduce the odds of a post deployment failure!
Introducing The “Blueprint Test” button!
It’s a very simple thing – but also extremely important, and impactful. When selecting the test button, a number of constraints and configurations are validated from the configurations made within the blueprint
- Do my compute constraints allow workload placement?
- Am I leveraging a valid tag on my network configuration?
- Are my Accounts/Zones available for deployment?
So what does this look like when we intentionally set a tag constraint incorrectly? Lets take a look! Observe the GIF below to see this new feature in action!
Stepping through what happens in this process:
- We create a blueprint deploying a machine, and tag it with an invalid constraint tag
- Upon testing, the system advises us that we will fail to provision
- We correct and test again – receiving a successful message
- A network is added to the blueprint, and tagged with an invalid network constraint
- Test runs, and receives a failure
- We correct our network tagging and test indicates a successful provisioning will occur
All of this happens quite quickly – and allows an author to reduce the odds of delivering a non functional service to end users.
We continue to enhance our blueprint authoring capabilities, which we’ve discussed several times on this blog (Enhancements to Cloud Assembly Blueprinting, Introducing Blueprint Expressions in Cloud Assembly). These enhancements continue to aim to make consuming our service effortless, and get you excited about building Infrastructure as Code!
Interested in seeing more? Mosey on over to cloud.vmware.com/cloud-assembly and sign up for a trial! Until then, happy coding!
