Rackspace Takes Dreadnot Open Source

With Dreadnot, Rackspace engineers are able to push code into production faster than ever. Paul Querna, engineer on the Rackspace Cloud Monitoring team explained to InternetNews.com that their product lives over multiple regions and they wanted whole region coordination to be able to turn a whole region off, upgrade it, test and then do the next region five minutes later.

“A lot of tooling that exists is the low level of going to one server and running a command,” Querna said. “Dreadnot is about building the higher level orchestration to help you deal with a distributed system like the cloud.”

Querna added that Dreadnot is about reducing the process of deployment down to pressing a button on a webpage instead of it being a lot of manual work. He added that his team had originally started using Deployinator to solve their deployment needs but they ended up customizing it a lot so they built their own tool, Dreadnot.

Querna’s team works on Rackspace’s Cloud Monitoring capabilities and the core of the technology is an API driven monitoring system. The system has a REST API that lets administrators specify conditions when they want to be alerted to a system event. Dreadnot is used by Rackspace to deploy the cloud monitoring system itself.

“The monitoring system can never go down, so our deployments can not cause down time,” Querna said. “That’s what drove us to solve the problem really well with Dreadnot.”

Read the full story at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet:
Rackspace Open Sources Dreadnot for Data Center Software Deployment

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist