Delivering the impossible - with some duct tape and automation - Robin Gilijamse
It's February 2020, and rumors of a dangerous pandemic are coming from the east. The Director calls you into his office. Can you investigate what it takes to scale our current VPN solution to accommodate most of the workforce working from home? The obvious truth is that it can't be done, not without significant investment in new hardware and circuits, and that just can't be delivered in time.A week later, it turns out that this pandemic thing is very real. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create a new VPN solution in the cloud that would scale to serve the entire company worldwide. You can use only the components and tools you have on hand, and it has to be up and running in two weeks.This is the story about how we were able to solve a difficult problem with a challenging deadline, by using Terraform, Ansible, Python, and a lot of improvisation. All to comply with RFC 1925 rule 1: It Has To Work.