hashiconf-eu-2016

This repository contains the demo materials from a live presentation at HashiConf EU 2016. It is a step-by-step guide for deploying a sample web application, called "hashiapp," across a cluster of servers on Google Cloud. The main goal is to show how a set of tools (the "HashiStack") work together to run applications reliably, discover them on a network, and manage their secrets like database passwords.

The instructions walk you through a practical workflow. First, you create security permissions so the application can access the tools it needs. Then, you deploy the application and set up service discovery, which is a way for different pieces of software to automatically find and talk to each other without hardcoding IP addresses. You also set up a load balancer to distribute incoming web traffic across multiple copies of the application. Finally, the guide demonstrates how to scale the app up to handle more visitors and perform a rolling upgrade to a new version without taking the service offline.

This project is aimed at developers, system administrators, or anyone trying to learn how to manage modern infrastructure. If you are a founder or technical PM looking to understand what a robust, cloud-native deployment process looks like, this serves as a concrete example. It shows the exact steps needed to move from a raw cloud server to a managed application that can be safely updated and scaled, rather than just describing the concepts in the abstract.

Because this is a demo tied to a specific conference talk, it assumes you already have the prerequisite cloud servers running and the necessary software installed. The README is essentially a script to follow along with the presentation. It does not explain what the underlying tools are or why they were chosen, so it works best as a hands-on tutorial rather than a standalone educational resource for a complete beginner.