22: Declarative Infra and Beyond

In the very old days, if you needed more storage for your database, you had to walk into the data center and install another server. Now you can just log into your cloud provider’s console and click a few buttons. Voilá, more storage. So easy! But what if you’re replicating that storage configuration for hundreds of databases at once? Suddenly, that’s a lot more clicking. Not so easy! (Plus, very tedious and very error prone.) So instead of living with this “ClickOps” approach, we developed a declarative infrastructure model — our very own “infrastructure as code” solution for managing cloud resources at Spotify scale. Instead of manually configuring each resource, developers just describe the state they want. And once we adopted declarative infra, we unlocked ways to improve not just how we manage resources, but also how we update policies, manage dependencies, and make other changes to code across our entire fleet of repos — quickly, safely, easily. In other words, programmatically.

Host Dave Zolotusky talks with David Flemström — who went from pushing the limits of Spotify’s infrastructure as a feature developer to working on the platform team in order to improve infrastructure for all of our developers. The two Daves discuss what declarative infrastructure means at Spotify, our journey to adopting it (going from Puppet to cloud consoles, to something better than both) and why we did it, how our model works (Kubernetes!), how it changed the relationship between our feature teams and our platform teams, how this shift helped enable Fleet Management at Spotify, and where we’re going next with abstracting infrastructure so that it helps our engineers do more, more easily.

Learn more about declarative infrastructure and Fleet Management:

• NerdOut, Episode 12: Fleet First
• Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 1): Spotify’s Shift to a Fleet-First Mindset
• Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 2): The Path to Declarative Infrastructure
• Fleet Management at Spotify (Part 3): Fleet-wide Refactoring

Read what else we’re nerding out about on the Spotify Engineering Blog: engineering.atspotify.com

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