Immutable Infrastructure is not a new concept and while there are many examples of successful implementations it would be a lie if we said that the recent hype around containers in general and Docker in particular hasn’t made the concept more widespread.
As it often happens in these cases, we see a lot of different interpretations of its meaning, benefits, challenges, and adoption paths. We asked 6 experts who have been thinking, writing and implementing Immutable Infrastructures to share their experience by answering 6 questions on the topic:
1) What does Immutable Infrastructure mean to you?
2) What’s your position on Immutable Infrastructure and why?
3) What are the main benefits you see/care about?
4) Biggest adoption challenges/things that are not there yet in your opinion?
5+6) Starting from scratch is (relatively) easy. What about those with existing systems? any hints on how others could get started moving towards an Immutable Infrastructure?
The 6 experts
- Kief Morris: Continuous Delivery Practice Lead for Europe with ThoughtWorksin London, specializing in tools, practices, and processes for the Continuous Delivery of software
- Andrew Phillips: heads up product management at XebiaLabs, building tools to support DevOps and Continuous Delivery
- Florian Motlik: CTO and Founder of Codeship where he makes sure the System is up and running as well as getting it into as many hands as possible
- Julian Dunn: engineering manager at Chef, where he helps to build products on top of the core Chef product portfolio
- Matthew Skelton: Continuous Delivery specialist, DevOps enthusiast, and an Operability nut. He set up and co-runs both LondonCD and PipelineConf. He is co-founder and Principal Consultant at Skelton Thatcher Consulting
- Ben Butler-Cole: likes to build systems rather than software. He has spent the last twelve years looking for ways to avoid unnecessary work. When all else fails he likes to write code in languages that haven’t been designed to hurt him. He currently works for Neo Technology.