It all began with a challenge

In the consulting job, some tasks can be a bit repetitive. They also take up valuable consulting time that the client would be more than happy to use for higher value-added tasks. So, my team and I started thinking about a solution two years ago. Which tasks could be automated to facilitate the work of our consultants and speed up the delivery to the client? The deployment of infrastructures. Of course!

Then COVID came along. It was a disaster for everyone… but this pandemic gave us the opportunity and the time to start the discussion: How could we implement a IaC (Infrastructure as Code) solution usable for all on-premises platforms and for public Cloud providers. The idea behind this question? Deploy multi-technology infrastructures in a minimum of time and effort including all our Best Practices and satisfy our consultants and customers. A great way to kill two birds with one stone.

The bumpy road from the idea to the realization

The idea is there, the feedbacks are positive, everyone is enthusiastic. Next step: the development. This is where the first big questions came in: Should we use the services provided by the Cloud providers to deploy infrastructures with IaC? Nope, because that meant managing different solutions for each Cloud provider. Not efficient. Another corollary: you would have needed as many experts as solutions. At a time of IT labor shortage? Not efficient either.

But we are not afraid of a challenge. We pushed the thought further and found a solution: using Ansible for the deployment! Why Ansible? Because it fully met all our requirements and, icing on the cake, it also has many collections/roles for the different Cloud providers. You gotta 💙 Ansible. The idea was good on paper. But the practice quickly turned out to be “bumpier” than expected. One of the problems we encountered was that the different inventories could not talk to each other. So, we had to switch from one inventory to another, and could not get an overview of all the components deployed at the different Cloud providers. Additionally, each inventory had its own structure making the code too complex to manage.

The YaK is born!

The taste of challenge runs in our veins. So, we put our heads together and decided that you’re never better served than by yourself. Result: we developed our own product with our own Ansible inventory. Our IaC solution was born!

The happy moms and dads were so moved that they had a tough time finding a name to match their happiness. At dbi services, we love IT and simple things: We have developed an IaC solution, why not simply call it YaK? It suits us all the more since the YaK is a solid, reliable… and adorable animal, isn’t it? 🥰 All that was left was to convince our marketing team to follow our lead and come up with a logo.

We fully trust the potential of our YaK. We now have to convince you too. So, we have opened its core part to the Open Source community. It is all yours to test. See you here: https://www.dbi-services.com/products/yak/

I also take this opportunity to thank Jérôme Witt, Nicolas Penot, David Hueber, Joël Cattin and Ali Ashgari who have been part of the project since the beginning. Many others joined us since: Nicolas Jardot, Nicolas Meunier, Chay Te, Jean-Philippe Clapot, Pascal Brand, Olivier Spiesser, Alexandre Nestor, Alain Fuhrer… and it’s not finished 🙂 #besharing #besuccessful #bdbi