May 20, 2015
by James Fryman
Time and time again, we hear of companies achieving rapid acceleration with DevOps. Companies are touting success with the metric of deploys/day, sharing new baselines of 10, 50 or even 100 deploys/day. In more mature organizations the likes of LinkedIn, Netflix, Etsy, Facebook and others, this number is a startling 1,000+ number. But, what does this even mean?
Unpacking this number is often one IT leaders stumble on, and is the greatest source of pushback when talking about rapid acceleration. How stable is the software being delivered? How many of these deployments are successful? What constitutes a deployment?
These questions and more often end up creating analysis paralysis, and nothing changes. In fact, the most common response starts with, “There is no way we could implement something like that at my company because…” We know this to be false. Companies who have traditionally delivered in a waterfall fashion with a single, bloated deploy per month or quarter are successfully transitioning to rapid deployment posting similar baseline numbers as other teams.
How then can you be successful in beginning software delivery? There is no single silver bullet or magic wand, but there is a fairly prescriptive methodology for achieving our goal of rapid delivery. Let’s dive in and take a look on how to get started.
StackStorm becomes certified for distribution on the Microsoft Azure cloud itself
May 19, 2015
One of the major challenges that any organization routinely faces is managing all the complexity associated with deploying application workloads in the cloud. Once those workloads begin to leave the local data center finding some way to automate the management of the public cloud they are running on becomes a much higher priority than it ever do when those workloads were running on premise.
To address that issue specifically on the Microsoft (MSFT) Azure cloud, StackStorm today announced that it has extended the reach of its open source IT automation integration framework to include support for Azure Virtual Machines, Azure Blob Storage and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) on the Microsoft Azure cloud. In addition, StackStorm announced that its software is now certified for distribution on the Microsoft Azure cloud itself […]
May 15, 2015
by Evan Powell
Yesterday’s inaugural event-driven automation meetup was informative, and a lot of fun.
LinkedIn did a great job of hosting and accommodating us at the last minute, as reservations exceed expectations and a larger room, more pizza, and beer were needed.
It was great to see friends from Netflix, HP, Facebook, Asurion, eBay, VISA and elsewhere in attendance. The questions were sharp and direct. As someone pointed out – “event-driven automation” is a relatively new space now getting tremendous attention as operators seek to compare notes on how they are boosting their operational agility through intelligent automation.
I strongly recommend the talks given by both Brian Sherwin and Dmitri Zimine.
Brian’s talk got right into why and how LinkedIn built what they are calling Nurse. His talk was engaging and straightforward and Nurse itself is clearly extremely well thought through. Nurse has been designed to do remediations as simply as possible, with workflow and basic event handling included. While Nurse is relatively new and is being rolled out more broadly within LinkedIn, it already is handling some thousands of plans a week. It is run as a true Remediation as a Service in that the developers themselves – who are responsible for most of the ops of their code – utilize Nurse to save time and improve availability of their applications a pattern we also see frequently with StackStorm. LinkedIn has not yet open sourced Nurse; however, Brian indicated that they are interested in doing so.
StackStorm Extends Support for Users Beyond Linux / FreeBSD Servers, Provides Ability to Directly Manage and Orchestrate Windows Infrastructure
PALO ALTO, Calif. — May 14, 2015 — StackStorm, a provider of open source event-driven automation software, today announced the availability of StackStorm software as a certified solution on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Additionally, StackStorm announced that it is now offering StackStorm users the ability to wire operations automation into Windows Server and Microsoft Azure services, including Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Blob storage.
StackStorm’s support for these Microsoft products allows users to automate their infrastructure using event-driven automation, an approach to tying together and automating entire environments used to run some of the world’s largest environments including Facebook and Google.
With these integrations, users are now able to directly manage and orchestrate their Windows Server infrastructure and their Azure services using StackStorm. With StackStorm’s direct support now available, those operators can re-use all of their existing Windows PowerShell-based tooling and automation scripts. This means users can immediately start receiving the value and benefits of StackStorm event driven automation without incurring additional overhead. Because many new automation tools don’t embrace the re-use of existing tools and scripts, this forces development teams to incur huge costs in terms of time, resources, porting scripts and existing infrastructure to new tools.
May 1, 2015
by James Fryman
ChatOps is the methodology of bringing operations work that you are already doing into the context of the conversation you are currently having. Ultimately, leveraging ChatOps leads to increased transparency and democratized IT delivery. To achieve this, SMEs should codify their knowledge using a system such as StackStorm to help form that information so that it is consumable by everyone.
Check out my talk discussing not only the philosophy behind and history of ChatOps, but also best practices for implementing and maintaining ChatOps in your environment.
With our v0.9 release, we have added a feature to enable ChatOps. ChatOps via StackStorm is ready for trial and we would really appreciate some feedback. Please follow the instructions to set up ChatOps using StackStorm.
April 30, 2015
by Evan Powell
The pace here never seems to let up, and in fact it just keeps accelerating, as Thursday we introduced the general release of version 0.9 of StackStorm. The new release supports an important partnership with Microsoft and adds some new visual authoring tools in our new WebUI to simplify use of StackStorm.
Additionally, as always, we are listening to you on IRC (#stackstorm on Freenode) and to our supported customers as well and constantly improving and fixing the platform itself. Please take a look at the release notes to see all the details.
With 0.9 we will be supporting Microsoft products and services including Azure and Microsoft Windows.
We will talk much more about this relationship in the next week or two along with our friends at Microsoft. As an aside, I’m absolutely flummoxed – in a good way – by the enthusiasm and professionalism and, yes, friendliness of the team we work with at Microsoft. I’ve dealt with pre anti-trust Microsoft and still carry scars from all those years ago. As many have pointed out, today’s Microsoft is a lot, lot different than in those days.
As you’ll note, we are not charging for StackStorm on Azure. We’re hopeful this will be another way for users to try out StackStorm without much friction. Note that Rackspace integration for StackStorm is of course strong as well and we have users running us on Digital Ocean and AWS of course as well.
April 24, 2015
by Manas Kelshikar
We merged some awesome new packs to our main community repo, StackStorm Exchange, and continued making changes to others:
Lots of changes are appearing in st2incubator in preparation for an upcoming release.
READ MORE…
April 23, 2015
by Evan Powell
Our own James Fryman has written the foreword to a new book from VictorOps, titled ChatOps for Dummies. The book is described as “a high-level guide to understanding the origins of the practice, the benefits and tools needed to get started, and important examples and tips to remember as you begin to explore ChatOps for your team.”
What’s the connection between ChatOps and StackStorm, and why should you care? StackStorm is used as the automation platform underlying ChatOps implementations at companies as diverse as Rackspace and various large SaaS operators and financials.
These users benefit from StackStorm running underneath the actual bot delivering the integration to chat – typically HuBot. Instead of having the chat client or the underlying bot as yet another integration to be wired together NxN across the environment, StackStorm users simply plug ChatOps into StackStorm and they have immediate access to the several hundred integrations already available in the StackStorm community.
Via ChatOps, all of the systems into which StackStorm ties can be accessed – and can be automated. Also help, audit, redundancy and manageability are built into StackStorm, which further reduces the maintenance burden. Plus, users can actually “see” the execution of long running tasks, greatly simplifying troubleshooting.
READ MORE…
April 20, 2015
by James Fryman
In order to unleash the true power of StackStorm, a good first step is to learn about actions. Actions are the cornerstone of the StackStorm system, representing what we commonly refer to as ‘lego bricks’. Actions are what StackStorm ties together to compose complex workflows to drive even the most complex cases.
Today, we will explore actions within StackStorm. By the end of this article, you’ll have a great understanding of how…
Ready to start your automation journey? Buckle up, and let’s dive in!