Last week, Gareth Rushgrove (@garethr) and I hashed out our viewpoints on the intersection of DevOps and Immutable Infrastructure.  We recorded the call because we want to expand the discussion to include a broader audience and we’d love to hear your opinions!

The gist of the call is that DevOps processes are moving faster and faster as teams embrace the create-destroy-repeat pattern of cloud automation.  This pattern favors immutable images driven by cloudinit style bootstrapping.  This changes our configuration management practice because configuration is front loaded.  It also means that we destroy rather than patch.

We both felt that this immutable pattern will become dominate overtime.

However, there was significant nuance in our position about this change and the challenges that it will pose to operators.  If you care about how immutable infrastructure is going to impact your DevOps plans then you’ll enjoy listening to our short discussion.

If you’re still hungry for the how’s and why’s of Immutable infrastructure, I suggest listening to the excellent panel discussion RackN hosted last May.