UPDATED 08:00 EDT / MARCH 13 2018

INFRA

Rundeck aims to automate IT with new “operations-as-a-service” tool

Rundeck is a low key open-source platform used at companies such as The Walt Disney Co., Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. and Salesforce.com Inc. to automate their infrastructure operations.

Rundeck Inc., a venture-backed startup founded by the software’s creators, today pulled back the curtains on a commercial version of the project designed to bring its capabilities to the traditional enterprise.

The platform focuses on easing the complicated recurring tasks that infrastructure teams must perform as part of their everyday work. In a large enterprise, even the most routine changes often require running through an extensive checklist to ensure that everything goes smoothly. Companies typically use various automation tools to ease the chore, but there’s often still a significant manual element left.

The newly unveiled Rundeck Operations as a Service Platform alleviates the burden by enabling administrators to create reusable workflows for carrying out operational tasks. According to Rundeck, the platform’s capabilities can be applied in a wide range of areas.

A company looking to streamline the release of software updates, for instance, could use the software to create a workflow that handles the various preparatory steps involved in rollouts. Administrators may similarly use Rundeck to handle the task of recovering from an outage. The startup says that the platform lends itself to more specialized procedures as well, such as moving data into an analytics environment.

Rundeck is designed to work with a correspondingly wide range of systems. According to the startup, administrators can even incorporate other automation tools into a workflow. The pre-programmed nature of the workflows means that the platform can quickly execute them whenever the need arises.

Removing the delay of waiting on an administrator to manually carry out a task can speed up operations a great deal. That’s particularly valuable when it comes to time-sensitive tasks such as disaster recovery. The quicker an operations team brings an important system back online, the faster workers can resume their work. Plus, the fact that the process is carried out automatically lowers the risk of human error.

Rundeck’s value proposition is in many ways similar to that of Phantom Cyber Inc., which was acquired by Splunk Inc. for $350 million last month. The latter startup has developed a platform that lets companies create workflows for coordinating their cybersecurity systems to improve how they can fend off hackers.

Image: Pixabay

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