December 1, 2017
by Lindsay Hill
Second to last month of the year, and updates to the StackStorm Exchange keep coming. New Terraform pack, major updates to Consul pack, and a bunch more updates. Read on for the details.
By Dana Christensen
The 3-day DevOps Enterprise Summit (DOES17) hosted by IT Revolution and Gene Kim is sold out and in full swing in San Francisco!
READ MORE…
November 07, 2017
by Tomaz Muraus
StackStorm v2.5.0 has been released recently. In addition to Inquiries, it includes another widely requested feature – real-time output of actions.
Real-time action output streaming allows users to see any output produced by an action in real-time.
This makes troubleshooting and debugging actions much easier and faster. It is especially handy in environments where StackStorm is used as a CI / CD tool and for long running actions (do you have a long running action which builds and installs a software package and you want to see the progress in real-time? Now that and a lot more is possible).
Prior to this release, it was only possible to see the output once the action has finished (well, there were some workarounds which involved using “tail” command, but those workarounds had many limitations and issues).
November 2, 2017
by Dmitri Zimine
As of this week StackStorm is officially a part of Extreme Networks. We’ve changed hands 3 times in 18 months. We’ve survived 365 days of uncertainty. It’s over now. The future is certain and bright, more good stuff is coming soon. Seriously, it’s all good.
Source: Brocade’s “On-second-though” collection. Check it out, it’s fun.
November 1, 2017
by Lindsay Hill
More packs, more updates, more goodness. Here’s October’s roundup of new & changed packs. Zabbix, Keycloak, Foreman, Solarwinds and more. Plus a couple of proposals for pack changes to Kubernetes and AWS, and a warning about upcoming Python action changes.
October 31, 2017
by Matt Oswalt
StackStorm 2.5 introduces one of our most highly requested features: “Inquiries”. Inquiries are a way of “asking a question” in the middle of a workflow (Mistral or ActionChain), to get additional data before moving on.
For instance, while you can store service credentials in the StackStorm datastore and retrieve them using a Jinja snippet, some services require two-factor authentication. It’s necessary, therefore, to be able to pause the workflow at a certain point, and allow a human to “inject” this data into the workflow midstream. There are a number of other use cases for this functionality, including the simple “I’m about to do something stupid dangerous, should I proceed?”.
Before we get into Inquiries and how they work, an important note: we’ve been working hard on making sure the new feature is useful for a variety of use cases, and as robust as possible. However, it is a complex and fairly low-level feature that has a lot of moving parts, and before recommending it for production use, we’d like to spend a release cycle gathering feedback on the API and the user experience. So, for 2.5, we would love for you to use this feature in your test/dev deployments of StackStorm and let us know what you think. Don’t worry, this is not going to stay “alpha” forever! We expect that it will be “production ready” in StackStorm 2.6, due to ship later this year.
We are very pleased to announce that StackStorm v2.5 has shipped, including two big new features – Streaming Output, and the Inquiry Runner, aka st2.ask. Read on for more details about the new features:
October 10, 2017
by Dmitri Zimine
In Part 1 of the series, I shared my excitement with two new event-driven systems introduced last month: Event Grid from Microsoft Azure and Event Gateway from Serverless.com, and posted some observations on Event Grid.
Before we continue with Event Gateway, let’s bring the “terminology normalization” from Part 1. In the table below StackStorm terms are used as as a reference point for our blog’s regular readers, along with a short explanation of their meaning for the guests.
October 05, 2017
by Dmitri Zimine
Two new event-driven systems were introduced last month. Event Grid from Microsoft Azure and Event Gateway from Serverless.com were launched two days apart from each other. An event that triggered these announcements seem to be emitted by Emit conference on serverless. Serverless computing became a primary driver for the event-centric approach, and as serverless architectural patterns emerged, the need for a dedicated event router became apparent.
Time for our monthly roundup of new packs on the StackStorm Exchange. This time it’s a new pack for Extreme Networks devices, and usability improvements to the Email, Ansible, Sensu and Napalm packs.