An Intellyx Brain Candy Brief
Remember runbooks? Apparently somewhere over the last couple decades, as agile development moved to Infrastructure-as-Code and advanced monitoring, and operations started adopting ITSM and other service desk tools, the IT industry somehow lost the plot on documented, repeatable and observable procedures for execution.
Enter Rundeck. Rundeck provides a place to define, store and automate runbooks. But why do we still need runbooks at all?
While we have automated delivery tools, more often than not, there’s an additional complex workflow above every service ticket or requested action that requires human intervention and verification as it calls on multiple codebases, configuration scripts, vendors and infrastructure layers of every flavor.
“You want to encapsulate all the knowledge of your best API architects, DBAs, NOC professionals or Security teams,” says Damon Edwards, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Rundeck. “An expert could look through all the logs and spot some problem that happened in a deployment or restart. With visibility and diagnostics, any player in IT teams can connect exactly what they do in a Rundeck job, to the incident or configuration management record.”
Rundeck, which got its start as rather popular open source Ops diagnostic tool, acts as a system of execution atop leading ticketing and support resolution platforms as well as monitoring and continuous integration tools, allowing permission-based access controls for team members to either launch, confirm or observe any operational runbook in action or post-job.
© 2019 Intellyx. At the time of writing, Rundeck is not an Intellyx customer. Want to see more BrainCandy? Subscribe today. If you are a vendor seeking coverage from Intellyx, please contact us at PR@intellyx.com.
