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askCharlie DevOps Test

Before starting

Here at askCharlie, we truly care about deploying our applications using the best practices regarding software and infrastructure engineering and architecture.

This concern has allowed us to sustain our growth so far with a small team of high-skilled people, and as the company keeps growing this becomes an even more critical factor.

The problem

askCharlie environment is composed of several application components (aka microservices) using one central database. They're deployed in a hybrid infrastructure, comprising both AWS and on-premises resources.

Your assignment is to propose a solution for this problem: We need to deploy our Awesome Guestbook to production. The app uses our central database, which is in a different network (you don't need to care about latency between those two networks). It also uses redis. This solution must be able to scale to handle growth without requiring much maintenance in the long run. To be able to use all these components at scale, high availability is critical.

Deliverables

  1. A git repository containing:

  • A configuration management (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, your choice ;)) used to deploy a minimal version of the Guestbook

    • You don't need to provision the central database
    • You need to provision redis

  • A Vagrantfile that spins up one Ubuntu box and provision it using the tool above (for reference: https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/provisioning/)

  1. A PDF document containing:

  • Any assumptions you have made (after all, we're not providing much information about networking and placement);

  • A diagram with your proposed architecture;

    • Think about high availability here

  • Detailed explanation of your design choices (see the evaluation criteria for guidance)

  • Basic instructions on how to run the minimal version.

Evaluation criteria

We'll evaluate your deliverables according to how well you cover the following topics:

  • Scalability

  • Maintainability

  • Reliability/Resilience

  • Security

  • Performance

  • Cost effectiveness

A few tips

  • To draw the architecture diagrams: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/icons

  • If you find appropriate, feel free to leverage container technology (like Docker) to get your stack up and running. We'd appreciate it a lot.

  • Keep it as simple as possible! Use complexity wisely (like you would do in your daily routine).

  • Make sure to be thorough while explaining your design choices and trade-offs.