Acquisition, Docker and Rundeck
ZDirect, the wonderful company I work for has been acquired by TravelClick, a billion dollar hospitality solutions company.
First of all: Woohoo! I can’t be more excited to be around at this time to jump-start my career.
One of the changes to occur as soon as possible is the consolidation of our datacentre into TravelClick’s. One of our devs recently found out about Docker and got interested about its power (Hallelujah! Finally it’s not just me who’s interested). Later I bring up Rundeck, a solution to organizing our ad-hoc and scheduled jobs that will assist in the move to Docker.
Docker
His plan is to Dockerize everything we have running in the datacentre to make it easier for our applications to be run/deployed/tested/you-name-it. The bosses are fine with that and are backing him up. I’m excited since this is a fun project right up my alley.
Since I’m working my ass off trying to finish my degree, I’m only in one day of the week to wash bottles and offer some Docker expertise. Last Friday I had a good chat with the dev working on the Docker stuff. We chatted about Kubernetes, Swarm, load balancing, storage volumes, registries, cron and the state of our datacentre. It was quite productive since we bounced ideas off of each other. He’s always busy, juggling a hundred things at once so I offered to give him a hand setting up a Docker registry.
By the end of the day I had a secure Docker registry running on one of our servers with Jenkins building an example project (ZBot, our Hubot based chatroom robot), and pushing the image to the registry after it is built. An almost complete continuous delivery pipeline. What would make this better is a way to easily deploy the newly created Docker image to a host.
Rundeck
Rundeck is a job scheduler and runbook automation tool. Aka it makes it easy to define and run tasks on any of the servers in your datacentre from a nice web UI.
Currently, we have a lot of cron jobs across many servers scheduled to run periodically for integration, backup and maintenance. We also ssh into servers to run various commands for support and operations purposes.
Here’s the next piece to our puzzle. Rundeck can fit into many of our use-cases. A few of them are as follows:
- Deployment automation (bridge the gap between Jenkins and the servers)
- Run and monitor scheduled jobs
- Logging and accountability for ad-hoc commands
- Integrate with our chatroom, for all the ChatOps
- Automate more of production
As we move towards Dockerizing all of our apps, we have to deal with the issue of what we’re going to do with the cron jobs and scheduled tasks that we run. Since we’re ultimately going to move datacentres it makes the most sense to take the cron jobs and turn them into scheduled jobs in Rundeck. That way we can easily manage them from a centralized view. Need to run this scheduled job on another machine? No problem, change where the job runs. Need to rerun the scheduled job again? Just click a button and the scheduled job runs again.
The developers wear many hats. Dev and ops are two of them. Because we’re jumping from mindset to mindset it makes sense to save time by automating the tedious while trying not to get in the way of others. Rundeck provides the automation and visibility to achieve this speed.
With the movement of putting all our apps and services into Docker containers, Rundeck will allow us to manage that change while being able to move fast.
If you’re interested in joining us on this action packed journey, we’re hiring.