Rundeck vs. Competitors

[Will Sizemore]

I'm starting a small IT Consulting and Services company and I'm looking for the reasons why Rundeck is better than the competitors.

I figured the best thing to do is find out why some.of you chose Rundeck and perhaps why Rundeck over other vendors.

I'm all for Open Source and large communities. You've "sold" me on that already.

[Scott Chapman]

I'd be curious what options you classify as competitors. 

When I was looking around for something to manage hundreds of jobs per day, each with potentially a dozen or so steps, I didn't have much luck finding things other than heavy-weight "enterprise-class" products from the likes of IBM and CA. I've been in those environments, I don't have time to sit down with their sales team. Rundeck is open source and can be used freely and I could download it and get started right away. It has a paid subscription model suggesting it might survive for a while. It also can run happily in a number of different environments and alongside other applications on a single server. I.E. I didn't have to stand up a dedicated server just to manage the work on another server. 

According to our job number, we've apparently run 1.7 million jobs through our primary production Rundeck system. For the most part it works well. Note that the majority of those jobs are measured in minutes not seconds: they're really batch jobs with multiple steps, not a quick execution of some script on some server someplace. 

Nothing is perfect and there are certainly places where Rundeck could use improvement. The UI on v3 gets in our way and seems to be a step backwards. I'm not sure that we'll ever upgrade our main production system beyond 2.x because of that. I think there's now a way of purging output, but that took way too many versions before it came into the product. They did finally add some controls for limiting the output from running jobs but (at least in 2.10) it seems that it doesn't have an option for "just retain the last n lines/MBs", which would be the best option to my way of thinking. You can limit jobs to a single execution or not, but not n concurrent executions. 

Fun fact: I'd rather have JES. z/OS is just so much better than Linux at running and managing large batch workloads. Unfortunately, z/OS doesn't really have an easy on-ramp for small organizations. But I didn't expect that the thing I'd miss most from the mainframe is JES and JCL. 

Scott Chapman

[Tracy Walker]

Scott's question regarding options you classify as competitors is pertinent to the discussion.  Not to mention the all-important, "What are your clients trying to do?"  Rundeck might be a fit if the answer to that question is organizing and connecting automation, orchestrating across tool sprawl, self-service ops, basic scheduling, multi-environment ops management, eliminating toil...

 I see some overlap with different tools, but it's the combination of overlapping patterns that create interesting capabilities.  There are so many automation tools focused on infrastructure, artifacts, shell scripts, SQL scripts, security, etc.   Rundeck wouldn't replace any of those tools, but it can execute their automation and connect them together.    

Rundeck could replace cron or task manager for scheduling automation but doesn't do a lot of the "big job" scheduler advanced calendars, profiles, etc. so not really competing there either.  Because of the GUI and security, workflows become safe for self-service by using Rundeck as a security proxy, i.e. give someone permission to run a job that has security credentials built-in.

I've seen lots of software a little bit like Rundeck, but I haven't seen anything else exactly like Rundeck.  :)

[Jorn Knuttila]

Echoing the others' it's tough to answer this, because you neither suggested what you thought were competitors, nor specified a use-case  ;) responses, I'll add thatI've seen several string motivators for Rundeck being the lead part of the toolkit in IT Consulting and Services companies. 

For them, Rundeck is their central platform for things like deployments and day-2 operational procedures, because it allows for a powerful abstraction to a myriad of tools and practices, plus it lets you gather subject-,after-expertise in one place. Rundeck also gets used as sort of a "leave-behind" for managed clients. There, it once-again is a common abstraction for myriad of differing toolsets, deployments, infrastructure configurations, etc. at each and every client. In this scenario, not only do you and your employees get a common interface and toolset at each location, you can allow the end clients to self-service various IT tasks (as you deem fit) without having to open a ticket and wait. Nobody likes waiting.  ;)

Is this helpful?

[Will Sizemore]

I needed a tool like this when I was a government contractor supporting multiple courses - some of which ran overnight at remote locations.

At a later job, I found that we had a similar need but no where near the scale. A vendor wanted to sell something called Cimitra to my company. I'd never encountered software in the just enough administration space. I always wrote scripts and executed them on each system with task scheduler or as cron jobs.

I'm interested in working in this space - simplifying tasks and delegating to less-technical users.

Many of the competitors I've looked at are: Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, AWS CodeDeploy, IBM UrbanCode Deploy, Akamai Alta/Terra, Oracle VirtualCompute, and Google Cloud Deploy.

Some of these are VERY expensive. Some are inexpensive. If I was to add this to my service portfolio for my company, why might I choose Rundeck over Terra or Cimitra?

[Jorn Knuttila]

So, most/all of those are infra deploy tools. Great as they are, they do not have the breadth of Rundeck. What you *could* do is have something like Rundeck call any of those, if that were the case.

That aside, you'd likely choose Rundeck 'cuz it's an abstraction to pretty much everything, and it's a lot less expensive, if not free if the Community edition works for you.  ;)

[Scott Chapman]

Interestingly, we don't use it for code deployment at all. I have scripts for that that work fine and I always manually start and watch those so I don't really need Rundeck to watch over them. 

What we do use Rundeck for is running the application itself because the majority of our service is really related to batch processing of data. For us, we use Rundeck instead of something like Tivoli Workload Scheduler or CA-7. (Although those are focused on z/OS.)

On Thu, Sep 12, 2019 at 6:09 PM Jorn Knuttila <jo...@rundeck.com> wrote:

So, most/all of those are infra deploy tools. Great as they are, they do not have the breadth of Rundeck. What you *could* do is have something like Rundeck call any of those, if that were the case.

That aside, you'd likely choose Rundeck 'cuz it's an abstraction to pretty much everything, and it's a lot less expensive, if not free if the Community edition works for you.  ;)

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