April 14, 2015
IT automation isn’t a particularly new idea, but with the rise of platforms like Puppet and Chef it certainly is becoming a lot more industrial. The challenge is there are now multiple flavors of IT automation framework in use across the enterprise.
To address that issue StackStorm has created an open source event-driven framework for wiring together everything from Puppet and Chef to Amazon Web Services and Github.
StackStorm CEO Evan Powell says the company will soon release version 1.0 of StackStorm, which will form the basis of the company’s commercial support services, followed by […]
April 10, 2015
by Dmitri Zimine
This article originally appeared April 9, 2015 on DevOps.com.
Recently workflows have emerged as a fundamental part of the operational wiring at companies as diverse as AWS, Facebook, HP, LinkedIn, Spotify, and Pinterest, which just open sourced Pinball. We’ve witnessed a spike of interest in workflow-based automation, and a few interesting implementations coming to the open-source world in just the last year or two: Mistral and TaskFlow from OpenStack ecosystem, Score from HP, Azkaban from LinkedIn, Luigi from Spotify, and dray.it by CenturyLink for the Docker ecosystem, to name a few.
Workflows are used to orchestrate operations in infrastructure and applications, automate complex CI/CD processes, coordinate map/reduce jobs, and handle jobs to containers.
It is not surprising that when it comes to higher level automation and orchestration, workflows are widely used. To quote the Pinterest blog: “In realistic settings it’s not uncommon to encounter a workflow composed of hundreds of nodes. Building, running and maintaining workflows of that complexity requires specialized tools. A Bash script won’t do.” Workflows are superior to scripts in concept and in practicality.
April 3, 2015
by James Fryman
Day in and day out, the team at StackStorm is building tools that take away pain from the daily lives of Operations and Developers in IT Departments everywhere. We do this by focusing our efforts on absorbing all the Glue Code, the small snippets of code that tie together tools in your organization, and relieving the developer and operator of much of the traditional management overhead associated with automations. We also need to make sure that the tools we provide around StackStorm are equally enjoyable and frictionless to use. To that end, I would like to share with you how to rapidly build integrations with our integrated development environment, st2workroom.
If you’re just getting started with StackStorm, or are curious what it is, we have a great primer on the product… Take a moment, head over there, and give it a quick read or watch. We’ll be right here when you get back.
In a nutshell, StackStorm provides Event Driven Automation. StackStorm integrates with your various tools, and manages orchestration based on events that occur in your environment.
April 1, 2015
by Tomaz Muraus
Python users and developers will be gathering April 10-16 in Montreal, Canada, to attend the PyCon 2015 conference, and StackStorm plans to be there in force. StackStorm will have a booth (#607) within the expo hall at the opening conference, the largest of its kind for Python users, as well as two developers at the PyCon Development Sprints hackathon immediately following, April 13-16.
March 30, 2015
by James Fryman
This article originally appeared on New Relic’s blog.
I am hard pressed to think of a challenge in operations today as complex as Infrastructure Autoscaling. In this single use case several unique subsystems must all play in concert to facilitate the delivery of computing resources with little or no human involvement. Done right, it is difficult to deny the magic of a workflow coming together to provide truly elastic infrastructure.
But the challenges in a real-world implementation of an autoscaling infrastructure are many, with one of the chief issues being a lack of flexibility. Many organizations have large investments in existing processes and technologies. When an autoscaling solution doesn’t allow for integration with a specific monitoring service, or users want additional control on how machines are managed, the end result is often to avoid the integration altogether or build custom code.
All this being said, when StackStorm was approached by the Rackspace DevOpsorganization to help solve for custom workflows, we jumped at the opportunity! Who doesn’t love a good challenge? In the course of about a week, we were able to create a fully working solution composed of Rackspace Cloud infrastructure, New Relic alerting, and, of course, StackStorm. What I hope to share with you today is just how easy complex tasks like workflow automation can be tailored to your specific flavor of infrastructure.
March 27, 2015
by Lakshmi Kannan
It’s been another exciting week here at StackStorm. Feedback is pouring in and we are all busy addressing it and cranking out new features. Thank you for your wonderful input and appreciation. Here is a recap of what we did this week:
We’ve turned on authentication by default for package based deployments. In st2express, we have a simple file based auth as proof of concept. It might be a good time to read about setting up auth in StackStorm. We also improved the sensor container to automatically load/unload/reload sensors on sensor model create/delete/update events. You can now simply write a sensor, register it with StackStorm and the sensor is picked up automatically. Perhaps it’s time for you to hack a sensor and contribute to our growing list of packs in our StackStorm Exchange 😉 Look out for some of these features that will be rolled out as part of our 0.9 release. A lot of bug fixes and user improvements went into the master. Check out the changelog for more info.
March 20, 2015
by Evan Powell
The last couple of weeks we have hit an inflection point in that downloads are running at 5-7x February levels, IRC chats are getting more and more substantive, and folks like Rackspace and others are contributing to StackStorm (thank you! – let’s automate all the things – intelligently – together :)).
Here are some highlights including a few events at which we attended and spoke:
Please take a look here: Tomaz’s amazing slides
March 13, 2015
by Manas Kelshikar
One might think with all the efforts behind the 0.8 release, we’d take some much deserved time off — but alas, no such luck! There are too many important and exciting things to do around here. Without further ado, here is what we’ve been up to:
With the 0.8 release out into the wild, we quickly pushed out a few patch releases.
March 11, 2015
Hosts: Randal Schwartz and Dan Lynch
Evan Powell joins is this week to talk about StackStorm. StackStorm is an operations automation software that infrastructure and application environment so you can more easily automate that environment. With StackStorm you define, and share – as code – your operational patterns from events and triggers through to actions taken in response.
Guests: Evan Powell
Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/floss.
We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes.
Here’s what’s coming up for FLOSS in the future. Think your open source project should be on FLOSS Weekly? Email Randal at moc.egnehenotsnull@nylrem.
Thanks to Cachefly for providing the bandwidth for this podcast, and Lullabot’s Jeff Robbins, web designer and musician, for our theme music.
Runtime: 1:01:06
March 13, 2015
by Evan Powell
Too often industry pundits like myself make our names by screaming louder than the other pundit and by making outlandish projections in the hopes of cutting through the clutter, building our twitter followers, and otherwise achieving more pundit points.
Currently, I hear the extremists shouting about Chef vs. Docker and Docker vs. Rocket and Docker vs. OpenStack. I guess I hear a lot about Docker.
Last week, as an example, I heard folks clearly smarter than me making some pretty aggressive statements at the Pacific Crest Emerging Technology Summit, where I was one of the Mosaic experts PacCrest asked to speak to large institutional investors about cloud and trends in enterprise IT. I also heard some diatribes at Rackspace::Solve, where Rackspace demonstrated its use of StackStorm as a foundation of their DevOps services.