Wednesday, September 02, 2009

ControlTier 3.4.7 Released

ControlTier 3.4.7 has been released.
This is primarily a bug fix release, but some notable improvements have been made as well.

Documentation: The ControlTier Wiki

Notable bug fixes:

Node name/hostname are now correctly distinguished when installing deployments. You can now have two Nodes with the same hostname, as long as the Node names are unique, and ctl-depot -a install will work correctly.

Improvements:

Tags:

Workbench service manager views now display any Tags associated with a resource in the manager list view. Tag searching is also now fully integrated in the Workbench user interface.

Node Filtering:

CTL and CTL-EXEC now support using arbitrary attributes as node filters in the -I/-X arguments. E.g. "ctl-exec -I myattribute=something -- echo hello".

Retrying failed commands:

CTL and CTL-EXEC now also support a -F flag which lets the user specify a filepath to store a list of nodes for which failures occur. When you execute across multiple nodes using the -I/-X node filter options, and use the -K (--keepgoing) option, any nodes for which a failure occurs will be stored in the specified -F file. You can then re-execute with the exact same commandline, and CTL/CTL-EXEC will only execute on the nodes listed in the given file. If further errors occur, the nodelist will again be stored in the same file. Once all nodes have executed succesfully, the file will be removed. This facilitates retrying a failed command only on the failed nodes either manually or automatically.

Environment variables in scripts:

A new default mechanism for executing defined shell commands called "shell-exec" is introduced. This allows shell scripts/commands to acquire environment variables with values passed directly from the set of ControlTier metadata available to all commands.

Cygwin:

Installer script improvements provide a much smoother way to install ControlTier on cygwin-based Windows nodes.

Dispatching scripts to cygwin nodes via ctl-exec or Jobcenter now works correctly when the Node has os-family="cygwin", and registration of a Node via a ControlTier client installed on a cygwin node will correctly set the os-family of the Node.


Friday, July 24, 2009

ControlTier 3.4.6 Released

ControlTier 3.4.6 has been released.
This is primarily a bug fix release, with some improvements to Jobcenter, various coreutils, and some broad
changes to our documentation.

Documentation:

The ControlTier Wiki is now hosted at http://wiki.controltier.org/.

The Wiki has gone through some structural changes which will hopefully make it easier to navigate and find
the documentation you are looking for.

restructured into two sections, a User Reference and a Developer Reference. This is to improve readability
for end users who may not need the Developer Reference information.

Friday, June 05, 2009

Continuous deployment example

ControlTier has supported the concept of continuous deployment for years and it's great that the concept is becoming increasingly main stream. 

In ControlTier, the end-to-end build and deployment process is defined via the Updater "BuildAndUpdate" workflow that orchestrates the Builder's Build and the Site's Update workflows. You can read about the basics on our Wiki here: Continuous_deployment

There's also a practical hands on example using tomcat

Of course you can also support continuous deployment by having your favorite continuous integration server interface with ControlTier after the build is completed. 

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

ControlTier 3.4.4 Released

ControlTier 3.4.4 has been released.


This release has been focused on support for Windows in several forms:

  • Internet Explorer is now supported for the server web applications Workbench, Jobcenter, and Reportcenter. Both IE 7 and 8 are supported
  • Windows-based Examples have been added to the Wiki. See the Examples page.

Other bug fixes are also included.

Documentation:

Two new high-level Library Guides have been added to help you develop Tomcat and JBoss server management solutions. These guides tie together the related Type Modules that are included with ControlTier, and show how they can be used together to create a management solution.


We intend to produce these "Library" guides for each of the various technologies that ControlTier provides Type Modules for.

See the Solution Libraries Guide for the complete list of available Library Guides.

Tuesday, April 07, 2009

ControlTier all Apache 2 licensed in 3.4.3

The next release of the ControlTier distribution will switch to an all Apache 2 license agreement. All of ControlTier 3.x was already Apache 2 licensed except for the Workbench server web app so this really just makes it all consistent. Workbench had been licensed under GPL 2 due to previous business arrangements that have since been re-worked. 

How does this impact end users? Well, not much except for the knowledge that you only have one open source license to be aware of and that Apache 2 provides the most freedom of use. 

Thursday, April 02, 2009

New Whitepaper: Achieving Fully Automated Provisioning

Working with our friends at Reductive Labs, we've just finished a whitepaper called "Web Ops 2.0: Achieving Fully Automated Provisioning"(pdf).

There is a live example of our joint ControlTier and Puppet solution, naturally. However, the main point of the paper is much broader than that. What we are proposing is an outline of an open source toolchain for fully automated provisioning.

What's the criteria for "fully automated provisioning"?

That details are in the whitepaper but here's the list we came up with:
  1. Be able to automatically provision an entire environment -- from "bare-metal" to running business services -- completely from specification
  2. No direct management of individual boxes
  3. Be able to revert to a "previously known good" state at any time
  4. It’s easier to re-provision than it is to repair
  5. Anyone on your team with minimal domain specific knowledge can deploy or update an environment
Here's the proposed open source toolchain (with ControlTier and Puppet highlighted):




Read the whitepaper and let us know what you think. I imagine that we'll get some objection to either the criteria or the toolchain... but that's fine. Sparking a conversation is actually what we want.

The point of all of this is to encourage discussion on how open source provisioning tools fit together to provide real world solutions. It's all too often that we meet people looking to improve their operations but they are befuddled by all of the various open source choices that don't seem to have much relation to each other. Hopefully this paper will be a first step towards greater public discussion. Educating the public lifts all boats.

All of the content in the whitepaper is licensed under the Creative Commons (Attribution - Share Alike) license.

Update: See this post on the dev2ops.org for more information and progress on the next version

ControlTier 3.4.2 posted to SourceForge.net

ControlTier 3.4.2 is now available:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=151079

Here are the release notes:
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?group_id=151079&release_id=671303

And don't forget to check out the ControlTier Wiki for documentation:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/controltier/index.php?title=Main_Page

Sunday, March 01, 2009

New ControlTier Screencasts

New ControlTier Screencasts are now up on the wiki:
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/controltier/index.php?title=Screencasts

There you'll find:
  • Demo screencasts (JBoss deployment, build automation, using Jobcenter, etc...)
  • Automation development screencasts (Using ProjectBuilder, creating CTL modules, defining commands, etc...)
  • HowTo screencasts (importing packages, deploying packages, defining services, etc...)
  • Presentation on using ctl-exec
Additional screencasts will be added as they are produced. If anyone would like to make a screencast and have it included it in the list, send either the file or the link our way.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

ControlTier 3.4 Posted to SourceForge.net

I'm pleased to announce that ControlTier 3.4 is now available

For more info see the message group post and release notes:
http://groups.google.com/group/controltier/browse_thread/thread/69c91cf9e0a92e4a

To download ControlTier:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/controltier/

And don't forget to check out the new ControlTier Wiki (also hosted by SourceForge):
http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/controltier/index.php?title=Main_Page