Cloud Ops and Python lesson plan

lesson_plan.md

Bootstrapping a development environment!

• Register for a Dockerhub account
• Register for an Amazon Web Services account
• Install a text editor
• Get access to a Linux-ish terminal of some sort
  • VSCode might provide Git Bash
  • Could install Ubuntu on Windows from the app store
  • just run linux 4Head
• Install some Cloud Computing basics:
  • AWS CLI
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • kubectl

Docker basics

• What is any of this
• does docker run nginx work
• Writing a docker file
• Building a docker container image
• Pushing a docker container image to DockerHub
• Running a dockerized service locally with docker-compose

Python basics

• Setting up a Python dev environment
  • Installing a version of python
    • virtualenv
    • requirements.txt
    • In my opinion just use docker instead of dealing with virtualenv but it's still good to know
  • Python: Hello World
  • Python: Hello World+, like helloworld but with one trivial dependency to prove our build tools work
  • Sample Dockerized service: Flask and trivial endpoint
    • Make a single HTTP REST endpoint at GET /, it should return a JSON message containing the value of a few environment variables in your container
    • Get a trivial web service running locally
  • Docker build and push it to public Dockerhub repo so you can use it in the cloud

Terraform Basics

• Set up AWS credentials file
• What is terraform
• Why is terraform
• How do things
• Set up Terraform AWS provider
• Use Docker to build an AWS Lambda .zip package out of your Hello World+ python script and its dependencies
• Create an AWS Lambda function in Terraform
• Use Terraform to upload your Lambda function to the cloud
• Use the AWS CLI to invoke your test lambda function and see the output

Running a docker container in the AWS cloud

• AWS EC2

  • Create (In terraform probably. Maybe demo the AWS UI first.):
    • VPC module from Terraform repo, including...
      • security groups - If needed, output the ID(s) of these so we can add more rules manually
      • Security group rules
      • Subnet(s)
      • Route table(s)
    • EC2 Instance
    • Create or output DNS hostname for your EC2 instance
  • Install Docker on EC2 Instance
  • SSH to instance, copy docker-compose.yml to EC2 instance, do docker-compose build and docker-compose up to run the service
  • Change the environment variables in the docker-compose file, restart with docker-compose, check new output

• AWS ECS

  • Given the previous step, create in terraform...
    • A different EC2 instance running the official ECS optimized image
    • Create an ECS Service Definition
    • Create an ECS Task Definition that references your Docker container in DockerHub
    • Create a DNS hostname for your docker task

• AWS Fargate

  • Given the network resources in the previous step, create...
  • An ECS Service Definition
  • An ECS Task Definition
  • Create a DNS hostname for your docker task

Running a docker container on Kubernetes

• Set up a local Kubernetes master using Docker Desktop because running Kubernetes in the cloud can be expensive or hard to set up at first
• Write Kubernetes YAML describing...
  • An application Pod
  • A Deployment that creates a ReplicaSet of N pods
  • A Service that exposes the pods in the ReplicaSet
• Write new YAML to change some environment variables, kubectl apply, change the Deployment and watch the service change