Today Rackspace announced that it is open sourcing Dreadnot, a tool for automating and monitoring deployments with support for multiple regions. The project, which was heavily influenced by Etsy’s Deployinator, was built in Node.js and is used in production at Rackspace by the Cloud Monitoring team

The goal of Dreadnot is to enable “continuous deployment.” Rackspace engineer Paul Querna writes:

Rather than deploying less frequently with more manual testing, we deploy more frequently, relying upon a culture of test-driven development, code review and extensive quality assurance automation to catch bugs early and minimize service interruptions. Our maxim is that a new engineer should be able to push code into production on their first day on the job.

This idea of continuous deployment is central to agile development and DevOps. It enables teams to more quickly introduce new features, fix bugs faster and reduce the divergence and complexity of managing separate release and development branches. However, there remains a need to maintain reliability in mission critical apps.

Rackspace does this by heavily automating the deployment process and by using cross-region redundancy. Automation reduces the chances that mistakes are made, and uses different regions allows the team to deploy code to one availability region and verify that it works, without affecting other regions. Dreadnot enables the Rackspace team to do accomplish this more easily.

Dreadnot includes integrations with Git, Buildbot, Apache HTTPD and Chef Integrations.

Dreadnot was built with Node.js, the Express framework, Socket.IO and Bootstrap. Along with Deployinator, it’s a great example of how Node.js is being used in production for enterprise-grade applications.

NodeSummit, coming up January 24-25, will take a further look at how Node.js can and is being used by businesses. We’ll be covering the event live on theCube. Tune in then.