Driven by the need to fulfill their business goals while improving productivity, efficiency, and cost-savings, today’s IT teams are embracing a new style of operations management that keeps pace with the demands of the DevOps movement. Enter the solution: Operations as Service (OaaS) or Self-Service Operations.
As the new engine for change in the IT Operations Management space, OaaS helps enhance the efficiency and improve the bottom line of organizations around the world that run their own custom designed software solutions. Purpose-built for DevOps, OaaS blends management disciplines and proven business process transformation with intelligent, cloud-driven technologies to help organizations successfully achieve digital transformation.
SourceForge caught up with Damon Edwards, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Rundeck, to discuss Operations as Service and how this new approach to IT operations management helps support DevOps and businesses of all sizes. Edwards also offers his insights on how businesses can seamlessly migrate to the new way of Operations work and highlights the benefits of using Rundeck’s Modern IT Operations Management Platform.
Q: Can you share with us a brief overview of Rundeck (year founded, size, solutions, customers, etc.)?
Damon Edwards, the Co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Rundeck
A: Rundeck is the champion of IT Operations, the unsung heroes of modern business. Founded in 2016 (open source project started in 2010), Rundeck is currently a team of 35 with customers in over 15 countries. Rundeck is a Self-Service Operations platform that significantly reduces interruptions, enables quicker responses to incidents, and enhances visibility into Ops activities. Rundeck is used by enterprises to modernize and streamline their Operations by allowing a broader number of people — even those outside of traditional Operations boundaries— to have secure and safe self-service access to Operations tasks. This new ability to distribute control is essential for the success of companies undergoing Digital, DevOps, and SRE transformations.
Q: What types of organizations do you currently serve and what pain points do you seek to solve?
A: The typical Rundeck user suffers from organizational complexity as much as they do infrastructure scale (and it is usually a combination of both). For them, everything takes too long, costs too much, and breaks too often. Anyone who touches Operations finds themselves spending an inordinate amount of time either waiting on someone to do something for them or having someone wait on them.
Q: What exactly is a self-service operation? And how does this approach help support DevOps and enhance IT operations management?
A: Self-service is a design pattern that we have seen emerge in enterprise operations organizations that are realizing that the status quo isn’t suitable for today’s business demands. Namely, their organization can’t move quickly enough with the old model in which only a relatively small trusted team can do operations tasks (especially in production). Self-Service Operations is a game changer because you can tie together all of your existing tools, scripts, commands, and API, create standard operating procedures, and then safely give out access to those procedures. That trusted Operations team stays in ultimate control, but they are staying out of the way of other teams. The organization can move faster and that Operations team finds itself with more time to work on projects that add enduring value to the business.
Q: As digital disruptions impose greater demands on organizations, companies need to consider a holistic and scalable approach for managing their business operations and technologies. How can Rundeck help IT teams migrate to the new way of Operations work and achieve a successful digital transformation?
A: Digital transformation is really about two things: integration and speed. The integration piece is about connecting and combining systems and processes that previously lived in isolation. The speed piece centers around business demands to move quicker. These forces increase both the workload of Operations and the complexities with which Operations must contend. By enabling Self-Service Operations, Rundeck makes it easier for teams to quickly create and share workflows that span multiple tool silos and delegate the running of operations tasks to wherever in the organization that control is needed. Rundeck is about enabling collaboration when it is needed, and staying out of the way of others when that is needed.
Q: Can us tell us more about Rundeck’s Modern IT Operations Management Platform? What are its highlights and what separates it from the other solutions available on the market?
A: As a platform, Rundeck has a lot of different features and capabilities. One of the most popular characteristics of Rundeck is its cost-saving feature that saves Operations engineers from having to create the parts that would be difficult programming tasks (workflow engine, notifications, error-handling, access control, logging, UI, API, etc) while allowing them to reuse their existing skills and the scripts or tools they have already made. Rundeck treats literally any scripting language as a first class citizen (Rundeck doesn’t have its own DSL). You like Bash, great. Powershell, no problem. Python, we have you covered. Just drop in what you (or your colleagues) have and you are off and running with Rundeck.
Q: As advocates of the open source framework, why is an open source approach important to modern IT organizations?
A: I think people want to know that they are investing in learning an open and transferable skill. At some useful level, they need to be able to move jobs and take that framework and skillset with them. If they don’t have that freedom, they are limiting their own freedom. That desire for freedom also extends to their employer as well. Part of having the ability to move quickly is having the freedom to do so. Almost like a Software as a Service (SaaS) with a free tier, open source tools allow companies to get started, experiment, and then expand to a commercial relationship, if the need (and success) is there.
Q: How can DevOps and/or IT teams manage the risks associated with using open source components in their applications more effectively? Is there a particular vulnerability that developers and/or IT teams must be paying attention to?
A: Like anything, I think it all comes down to a question of risk appetite and whether you want to internalize or externalize your costs. If you are relying on a project developed by a diffuse community then you have to decide what your risks are and internalize the cost of staying on top of possible vulnerabilities. Of course, if available, you can externalize your cost and buy the supported version. One way or another, everyone pays. What you pay and to whom just depends on the context of the situation.
Q: Looking ahead, what trends, strategies, and technologies do you think will shape the future of IT and DevOps? And what else can we expect from Rundeck in the future?
A: Digital Transformation might be a poorly defined term, but in general it represents the business winds that are sweeping throughout our industry. DevOps, SRE, CloudNative, Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence/machine learning— any of the current IT trends — are all driven by this wind. We see Self-Service Operations as a key part of all of it. Why? Because human operators will always matter and the human to tool interaction is critical for their success.
About Rundeck
Rundeck is the creator of operations as a service and a trusted open source software that powers self-service operations. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Rundeck’s new style of IT operations management removes bottlenecks, improves security, and enable organizations to scale faster and run their operations more efficiently.