December 19, 2014
by Patrick Hoolboom
As promised, the weekly StackStorm update! The team has been hard at work on platform improvements, getting the web interface squared away as we worked towards releasing it, as well as cleaning up some loose ends in the community repo and adding new integrations.
We are seeing some more feedback and even contributions – thank you for those, and please keep them coming!
This blog will be on hiatus next week unless Santa delivers an amazing new integration I’m not expecting.
December 18, 2014
by James Fryman
StackStorm was recently invited to speak on [HangOps] to discuss a growing trend in IT Operations – event driven automation. I spoke with Brandon Burton and other community members about the basic concepts of event driven automation and how StackStorm enables companies of all sizes start or continue their journey implementing DevOps practices. Topics discussed in this podcast include: Intersecting Event Driven Infrastructure with ChatOps, Practical Use-cases for StackStorm, and future growth of the platform and community at large.
Watch the video podcast here:
December 12, 2014
by Patrick Hoolboom
At StackStorm, we want to enable our users to take advantage of everything our product has to offer, as well as provide feedback to us on the latest features as quickly as possible. In this spirit, we plan to share weekly updates regarding our progress, including new integration packs, improvements on existing packs, platform updates, and any tools created to help streamline the automation process. Our announcements will highlight both StackStorm-developed integrations as well as community contributions. We hope to be able to provide an overview of what has happened throughout the week as well as point out anything exciting that we see coming down the pipeline.
Stable
Changes to our main community repo, StackStorm Exchange, include:
New Relic
This week we introduced the first iteration of our New Relic integration pack. It comes with actions for getting alerts and metric data from the New Relic API.
December 8, 2014
by Tomaz Muraus
StackStorm v0.6.0 was recently released. This release includes many new features, bug-fixes and improvements.
One of the new features this release brings is user content sandboxing and isolation. In this post we will share why we have done this, and what benefits this brings to our users. We’ll also take a quick technical dive and look at the implementation details.
WHAT IS CONTENT PACK SANDBOXING AND ISOLATION?
Users integrate StackStorm with 3rd party systems (AWS, OpenStack, Puppet, Git, JIRA, Libcloud, etc.) and extend its functionality by installing one of the official or user-contributed packs from the StackStorm Exchange.
December 8, 2014
by Dmitri Zimine
It’s been one month and 5 days since we open sourced StackStorm during the OpenStack summit in Paris. Since then, our team has had our heads down developing the software, checking off the items on the roadmap, and applying learnings from the field and feedback from community users to our product.
I am happy to share that we’ve just released a new version of StackStorm — v0.6.0.
What’s new?
1. YAML for all content
Moving to YAML for all content was the top ask from the community: many found dealing with JSON a bit cumbersome. Now all StackStorm content artifacts — rules, action and trigger definitions, and ActionChain workflows – are defined as YAML. JSON is supported for backward compatibility.
November 26, 2014
At the recent OpenStack Summit in Paris, I had a chance to meet with StackStorm, a software operations automation company who announced the release of StackStorm 0.5, open source software for operations automation. I recorded a Podcast with their CEO and technology evangelist.
About StackStorm
StackStorm is an emerging leader of the third wave of operations automation. StackStorm solutions leverage existing configuration management and monitoring solutions to deliver automation that safely ties together todays loosely coupled, heterogeneous, ever changing cloud infrastructures. Built from the ground up combining ChatOps and Event Driven Operations, StackStorm’s vision is a world of self-driving data centers that learn over time how to better operate themselves.
Podcast
Listen Here
Watch Podcast Here:
December 1, 2014
by Patrick Hoolboom
I’ve spoken at a couple of events, and chatted with hundreds of people at these events about an idea that has been swirling around in my head for a while now. This idea has gnawed at my subconscious throughout a big part of my career in IT Operations, but I was never really able to put my finger on what was bothering me. I just knew that lack of visibility and consistency in procedures drove me crazy. The opaque nature of action performed during an outage, or even a scheduled operation was frustrating. Post mortems were a nightmare of hazy memories, chat transcripts, and various permutations of ad hoc log parsing.
November 25, 2014
PALO ALTO, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–StackStorm, a software company leading the third wave of operations automation, today announced it will host a Cloud Online Meetup on Wednesday, December 10 focused on deployment and ongoing troubleshooting and remediation use cases on both OpenStack and AWS environments. During the meetup, Evan Powell, co-founder and CEO, and Patrick Hoolboom, DevOps engineer, StackStorm, will discuss challenges with existing automation that motivated the development of StackStorm, as well as give a demonstration of the company’s automation as a service software, which was recently released and is now freely available as open source software […]
November 24, 2014
by Patrick Hoolboom
I’ve done a couple articles about getting StackStorm set up, an introductory video, and put a fair amount of effort towards minimizing the barrier to entry for new users. Overall, I think StackStorm was successful in providing a quick and easy way to get our system up and running but users need more than that. Users need to see how StackStorm can help solve their specific pain points. We needed a way to illustrate that we can provide an easy to use solution without the steep learning curve of throwing out your existing tools. Over a series of a few blog posts we are going to go over some of the ways that we have leveraged the StackStorm platform internally and how these solutions could map to your environment.
One of the highlights of AWS re:Invent, judging by the Twitter stream and the points emphasized in Amazon CTO Werner Vogel’s Day 2 keynote and blog post, was the launch of Lambda.
In his blog announcing Lambda, Vogel calls the solution “the easiest way to compute in the cloud.” He goes on to describe it as both a way to run arbitrary code on AWS with complete abstraction away from the underlying infrastructure including EC2 instances, AND as a fundamentally better way to compose applications through the use of Lambda as an event-driven approach to intra-application behavior.
What struck us as interesting was Vogel calling Lambda “an event-driven computing service for dynamic applications.”
In his Twitter feed, he has this to say about it: