Study note on RunDeck

• Opensource tool to help automate repetitive tasks;  help orgnized commands into workflow and run it agaist pre-configured list of hosts,  using ssh (key based login) to remote execute these workflows;
• http://rundeck.org  for document, admin guide and videos;
• Java-Json based application, run from Rundeck server or admin node,  ssh trust established between rundeck servers to remote hosts;  Can create project/jobs in Web GUI or CLI;  the nodes(hosts) are in resources.xml in each project;  RunDeck stores job definition and history on configured database,
• Some basic terminology:
• Job:  sequence of steps to run, a.k.a workflow
• Node: remote host
• Project: logical group of jobs/nodes to orgnize work better;
• Resources : collection of nodes
• Resource Tagging in resources.xml:
• best practice to assign tags to nodes, thus can group them dynamically;
• For example:
• <node name="dc1sittom01" description="DC1 SIT Envrionment TomCat server01" tags="ALL,DC1,SIT,TOMCAT,TEST" hostname="dc1sittom01" osArch"amd64" osFamily="unix" osName="Linux">
• Above TAGS described the different groups this host could be in, thus a job could be target all hosts in those particular TAGs (or combination of TAGs)
• Filter:  for example:  tags:TOMCAT !hostname: dc1prodtom01 *!tags:UAT
• Jobs/workflows can be used repeatedly to help automation routine work