The Trunk: From the Ground Up

We've built a state-of-the-art, self-healing Artificial Intelligence cluster using the public cloud at AWS using cutting edge technology. We can't reveal our secret sauce (otherwise it wouldn't be secret anymore!) but read on to learn about how our Docker expert and Senior Software Engineer Jett Jones and the Bonsai Seattle team built a scalable, resilient AI Engine using some of today's most exciting configuration management, monitoring, and networking technologies. Provisioning resources in AWS is a tedious and error-prone task, due to the enormous number of possible options. To make this process repeatable there are several options, but the notion of a "tainted" machine drew us to HashiCorp's Terraform for machine-level provisioning over similar solutions such as Cloud Formation for launching instances and creating network configurations. The recently released Docker Swarm manages post-provisioning creation of services and some of the IPC functionality that allows the services to work together, as well as ensuring that services are launched on the correct machines and providing process management features around starting, stopping, and failure recovery.