Rundeck has emerged as a popular open source job scheduler and orchestration option for IT automation that enables IT teams to build runbooks that can be easily shared with others. The company behind it—Rundeck Inc.—has garnered $3 million in seed funding to provide enterprise-class support for instances in the form of the Rundeck Operations as a Service Platform.
Company CEO Stephanie Fohn says the Rundeck framework has gained popularity because it provides an agentless approach to creating runbooks capable of spanning multiple platforms, tools and scripting languages. That approach doesn’t require that software be on each endpoint to be automated or that the IT operations team standardize on one set of tools and languages to start integrating various DevOps processes, said Fohn.
In fact, the goal is to reduce resistance to DevOps in enterprise IT organizations by making it easier for IT professionals to employ their existing skills to create runbooks that can shared and executed by others, said Fohn.
Rundeck Inc. claims there already are more than 40,000 IT professionals participating in the open source project, which is already being used by more than 100 commercial organizations.
IT automation frameworks are not a new idea, but resistance to change traditionally has been high. Many IT professionals have been developing their own scripts for years, which they consider to be intellectual property they take with them from job to job. Frameworks that require them to learn new tools or languages are not readily adopted unless the organization they work for mandates them. But the number of IT organizations that have embraced IT automation frameworks as a percentage of the whole remains less than 30 percent.
Fohn said commercial support provided by Rundeck Inc. should make more organizations more comfortable adopting an IT automation framework that extends the shell scripts many IT professionals have already developed.
In the meantime, pressure on IT operations teams to manage IT infrastructure more adroitly at scale only continues to mount. Organizations are deploying and updating more applications at a faster rate than ever. Add to that a mix of emerging microservices technologies based on containers, and it’s apparent the complexity of the IT environment will only increase in the months and years ahead. Fohn said that means it’s almost a sure thing organizations will embrace IT automation and DevOps.
Rundeck offers an alternative agentless approach to managing IT at scale with the benefits of being free and having a growing population of IT professionals that know how to employ it. The degree to which Rundeck can move beyond a grass-roots initiative to become a bona fide movement remains to be seen. But given the total percentage of organizations that have yet to embrace an IT automation framework, clearly there’s plenty of opportunity.
— Mike Vizard
