Framework to set up a generic environment for applications

Abstract: Infrastructure is a common word used to express the basic equipment and structures that are needed e.g.  for a country or organisation to function properly. The same concept applies in the field of computer science, without infrastructure one would have problems operating software at scale. Provisioning and maintaining infrastructure through manual labour is a common occurrence in the "iron age" of IT. As the world is progressing towards the "cloud age" of IT, systems are decoupled from physical hardware enabling anyone who is software savvy to automate provisioning and maintenance of infrastructure. This study aims to determine how a generic environment can be created for applications that can run on Unix platforms and how that underlying infrastructure can be provisioned effectively. The results show that by utilising OS-level virtualisation, also known as "containers", one can deploy and serve any application that can use the Linux kernel in the sense that is needed. To further support realising the generic environment, hardware virtualisation was applied to provide the infrastructure needed to be able to use containers. This was done by provisioning a set of virtual machines on different cloud providers with a lightweight operating system that could support the container runtime needed. To manage these containers at scale a container orchestration tool was installed onto the cluster of virtual machines. To provision the said environment in an effective manner, the principles of infrastructure as code (IaC) were used to create a “blueprint" of the infrastructure that was desired. By using the metric mean time to environment (MTTE) it was noted that a cluster of virtual machines with a container orchestration tool installed onto it could be provisioned under 10 minutes for four different cloud providers.