An Immutable Future

Immutable Infrastructure has become one of the modern buzzword terms of the systems worlds to describe a method of operating software systems that once built are unchangeable. The mechanism for change is to build a new system and then replace the existing one, effectively producing an externally visible change.

The ResinStack is a project that aims to enable immutable infrastructure at the lowest levels for the Hashicorp stack based on Nomad, Consul, and Vault. This will be accomplished using LinuxKit, the same technology that powers Docker for Mac.

The name comes from the idea that the infrastructure is effectively cast in a block of clear resin. You can see it, you can interact with it in limited ways, but you cannot change it non-destructively. In this way, the system is quite secure, quite easy to reason about, and most importantly built on established principles of success from the world of container orchestration.