Rundeck: Automation and standardization of routine tasks in the data center
Standard Operating Environments (SOE) form the basis for the data centers of the future. Automation enables tasks to be completed securely and reliably in the shortest possible time.
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) are an important component. These describe recurring processes in a company. In the area of data center management, tasks such as installing a server, rolling out applications or creating or deactivating a user account are particularly noteworthy. The main challenge in using and describing SOPs is to keep them up to date and to ensure that the description is accurate. For some SysOp engineers, the instructions are far too detailed, for others too many degrees of freedom are not clearly defined. Despite the well-intentioned attempt at standardization, this results in inconsistencies in the configuration and errors due to human carelessness or inaccurate descriptions. The result is chaos, high effort and rising costs.
The open source project Rundeck (http://rundeck.org) helps to standardize and automate routine tasks or SOPs in data centers and cloud environments. Rundeck offers a range of options for automating time-consuming daily tasks. This increases the overall level of automation and makes it easy to create and share self-service web pages for SysOp teams. A granular authorization system allows you to decide how processes are automated. You can decide which teams or users have the ability to monitor operational tasks while others have the rights to execute tasks. With Rundeck, tasks can be executed on any number of servers in parallel or sequentially. A modern web interface and a command line tool are available for this purpose. Rundeck provides additional features such as access control, workflow creation, scheduling, logging and reporting as well as integrations for external data sources and CMDBs. Rundeck offers integrations with automation tools such as TheForeman, PuppetDB, Chef, Saltstack and the ATIX SOE Manager.
