Somebody I’m helping has an ancient, and i mean ancient (like 3 major versions before latest or so) install of Rundeck doing stuff for them. Might help them upgrade it to the latest (more like reinstall and configure from scratch, it was built years ago with assumptions no longer true), but before i commit I’d like to know if there’s decent replacements/alternatives for it these days.
In case you don’t know Rundeck, it allows you to set it up so that a number of users, with various privilege levels, are allowed to execute scripts on remote machines, with whatever privileges the given script needs, giving them parameters from an allowed set you configure. That’s all, no more, no less.
Sounds like something that should be common, but when you look for alternatives it gives you everything that’s ever been touched by the word DevOps, from Ansible and every “configuration engine” software ever made, to automation libraries and the like. I just want something that does this and no more, let people run scripts while preventing them to break stuff. If it’s something commandline friendly (Rundeck wasn’t as far as i can see) much better, and doubly so if it’s user friendly (have tried AWX and feels like it wants to be able to run the whole of Google from a browser window, dislike it in general, far too convoluted, and not user friendly at all for the not very techie office workers that use Rundeck today).
I work for a MSP. Recently, i started to introduce Rundeck in my team for the following reasons.
My team has a significant amount of conventional sysadmins, mostly running linux-based servers, some kubernetes. We do use infrastructe-as-code tools, such as saltstack, have access to ci/cd platforms and various tools. However, my team has only a few people developing, most don’t really know how to use git, let alone gitlab/github/etc. This results into a situation where many admins prefer doing stuff manually, instead of writing code with our infrastructure tools. Though, most would be able to write bash scripts.In order to “crowd-source” the development of our processes I needed a tool which is easy to use, somewhat easier to create workflows, and being managable (ldap, logging, acls), and adaptable (plugins, integrations), low costs, ideally open-source. Although our infrastructure wouldn’t need it since we already have capable tools, they are arguably too complex for my environment. complex in the meaning of not enough time/money to teach the majority of the team, lack of interest and motivation, etc.
My research resulted in Rundeck fitting best for my situation and requirements.Though there were a few other contenders, since Rundeck is not the most efficient workflow engine, nor has the most integrations, biggest community, etc.
- n8n.io might be worth a look.
similar market to n8n are:
Initially, this list helped me to identify points of research: awesome workflow engines
If your team is familar with Rundeck, and it has sufficient acceptance, wouldn’t upgrading to a current version of Rundeck be an option?
