Rundeck is an open source automation tool that helps automate routine procedures in data centers and cloud environments. It provides a simple user interface, user management, and can integrate with configuration management tools, CI/CD tools, and cloud platforms. Rundeck allows users to build automated workflows for deploying applications, provisioning infrastructure, responding to incidents, and enabling self-service for teams through a centralized access point.

1. One-Click Deploy using Rundeck
An Ops Swiss army knife tool
By Sai Kothapalle

2. Rundeck Introduction
• Open source automation tool
• Helps automate ad-hoc & routine procedures in datacenter or
cloud environment
• Simple User Interface
• User Management with AD

3. Why Rundeck should be part of your
OpsTools Box
• Can do advanced deploys not possible by config management
tools
• Build automated CI pipeline with Rundeck
• Self service teams with jobs that automate tasks
• Trigger Incident based jobs
• Easy manage deploys – rolling or parallel on different
environments, retry failed nodes
• Authorized central access through rundeck
• User trackabality, log executions
• Ship the job execution logs to your logging engine – elk,
fluentd etc

4. Where config mgmt. tools fail for
deploy
• Good for config management of infrastructure but fail for
custom deploy scenarios
• Chef, Puppet etc fail to trigger an immediate change in
infrastructure
• Cannot have chef-client and puppet apply deamonized in all
environments, example prod and critical environments.
• Many environments require rolling deploys.
• Fail to do ad-hoc deploys on multiple nodes

5. Rundeck integrates with CM tool
• Rundeck can be loosely coupled with Chef, etc to trigger chef-
client runs on parallel nodes
• Allows rolling deploy of chef-client so you don’t bring down
prod or stage environment
• Rundeck + chef/puppet/Ansible

6. Rundeck integrates with CI tools
• Rundeck supports plugins to integrate with existing ops tool
box
• Integrate rundeck with Jenkins
• Integrate rundeck with Artifactory
• Integrate with Hipchat/slack
• Build complex pipeline beyond regular CI pipeline

7. eToolchain with Rundeck

8. Rundeck ties into cloud
• Deploy to your EC2 nodes, with project based
access
• Plugins being developed for openstack
• Fetches node inventory from your config
mgmt tools too

9. Self-Service QA/Test and Devs
• Enable QA teams to start/ stop cloud
environments
• Enable QA teams to do their own upgrades
• Enable QA/Devs to trigger CI/CD pipeline
• Centralized access point for authorized access
• User traceability

10. Centralized access point for authorized
access

11. Sample Jobs that control your ELK
stack

12. Rolling Deploy built into Rundeck
• Automate Runbooks
• No more SSH into nodes

13. Complex Workflows
• Can be customized to do any repeated task/job
• For example, on a set of nodes
- stop a service
- Run a chef client/ puppet apply
- Do custom checks
- Start service
- Trigger notification – slack/hipchat

14. Rundeck deploys based on
environments

15. Trigger jobs from Slack

16. Trigger jobs based on Incidents
• Respond to incidents on cloud by triggering
jobs

17. Demo