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ahonor edited this page Jan 4, 2011 · 23 revisions

General

What is RunDeck?

RunDeck is cross-platform open source software that helps you automate ad-hoc and routine procedures in data center or cloud environments. RunDeck allows you to run tasks on any number of nodes from a web-based or command-line interface. RunDeck also includes other features that make it easy to scale up your scripting efforts including: access control, workflow building, scheduling, logging, and integration with external sources for node and option data.

How is it different than Puppet mcollective or Chef knife?

There is a bit of overlap between rundeck and Puppet's mcollective and Chef's knife. The three allow administrators to execute commands in a distributed environment. Rundeck has different goals though:

  • firstly, we want to create an easy way to define routine sequences as "Job workflows"
  • secondly, we are very interested in using metadata-level searches for defining targeted sets of nodes (that's a bit like knife)
  • we also see role-based access controls as a primary feature since we envision rundeck as a point of delegation for self-service

Ultimately, we plan on refactoring RunDeck to accept "dispatch providers" to delegate to tools like mcollective and knife.

Interoperability

Security

Technical