Shoreline Platform Automates Repetitive IT Tasks

Shoreline emerged from stealth today to make available a namesake incident automation platform that eliminates the need to manually perform the same repetitive tasks.

Anurag Gupta, Shoreline CEO, said the platform is based on domain-specific language, dubbed Op, that provides a simple pipe delimited syntax to integrate real-time resources and metrics in a way that allows DevOps teams to invoke an orchestration engine to automate the execution of a task from the Linux command prompt. Op employs a syntax that is familiar to any IT professionals that currently use shell commands and scripting tools to resolve IT issues, said Gupta.

That same Shoreline tool, however, can also be employed to create remediation loops that check for issues, collect diagnostics and apply repairs automatically in the background, he added.

Shoreline achieves that goal by first collecting metrics on a per-second basis via data collected from open source Prometheus monitoring software. Armed with that data, it then becomes possible to distribute queries to both collect data in real-time and run local loops in parallel to automate repairs, Gupta said.

The platform employs the JAX and XLA frameworks for machine learning algorithms to reduce the amount of CPU resources required to compute metrics and create alarms. Wavelets are also employed to compress the input metric stream. Finally, queries are portioned across historical data stored in the S3 cloud storage service from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and real-time data collected from each node.

All Shoreline components are designed to be fault-tolerant, added Gupta. Automation can still run locally to Shoreline backends, even when connectivity is lost. All processes have supervisors to restart when failing and reestablish connectivity.

Finally, Shoreline provides controls to limit the scope of a manual operator action and automate executions in a given time period to help prevent any errors from cascading through an entire IT environment. That approach makes it possible to safely automate tasks in a way that makes it less likely outages will occur because, for example, a misconfiguration winds up being propagated across every system, noted Gupta.

While IT environments are arguably more complex than ever, Gupta said it’s the repetitive tasks that take up so much of developers’ time. In the absence of any way to automate those tasks, an IT team will, over time, become increasingly burned out, which Gupta noted inevitably leads to mistakes being made.

At the same time, Gupta noted the Shoreline platform makes it simpler to onboard new members of an IT team because much of the tribal knowledge that once had to be learned on the job has been captured within an automation platform.

The arguments for automating IT have, of course, been growing louder and more frequent for nearly two decades. Most platforms that promise to automate IT have required a fair amount of expertise to implement and maintain. The Shoreline approach, in contrast, starts with a Linux prompt that many IT teams already routinely use to execute a range of tasks. The difference now is simply the level of scale at which those tasks can be performed with a minimum of programming skills.