Tutorials

This chapter presents working examples reflecting a variety of solutions you can create with Rundeck. Helping you apply concepts and features introduced in earlier chapters is the focus of these examples. To give them some context, the examples are about solutions used by Acme Anvils, a fictitious organization that manages an online e-commerce application.

Acme Anvils

Acme Anvils is a hypothetical start up selling new and used anvils from their web site. Two teams inside the company are involved with the development and support of the anvil sales application. Being a new company, there isn't much control over access to the live environment. Either team can push changes to systems which has led to mistakes and outages. Because the senior management is so enthusiastic, they drive the teams to deliver new features as frequently as possible. Unfortunately, this has led to another problem: the Acme Anvil web tier sometimes locks up and other times runs out of memory requiring occasional restarts.

There are actually two methods to the restart procedure depending on the problem: "force" versus "normal". The "force" restart is required when the application becomes totally unresponsive. The "normal" restart occurs when the application needs to free memory.

Depending on the urgency or the staff on hand, either a developer or an administrator conducts the restart, albeit differently. Because the developers write the software, they understand the restart requirements from an application perspective. The administrators on the other hand, are not always informed of these requirements but are well versed in restarting the application from a systems perspective. This has led to a divergence in procedures and has become the main source of problems that affect their customers.

An administrator, tired of the late night calls to restart the application, and frustrated by the knowledge gap between operations and development has decided to take the initiative come up with a better approach.