I’ve been posting about the unique composable operations approach the RackN team has taken with Digital Rebar to enable hybrid infrastructure and mix-and-match underlay tooling.  The orchestration design (what we call annealing) allows us to dynamically add roles to the environment and execute them as single role/node interactions in operational chains.

With our latest patches (short demo videos below), you can now create single role Ansible or Bash scripts dynamically and then incorporate them into the node execution.

That makes it very easy to extend an existing deployment on-the-fly for quick changes or as part of a development process.

You can also run an ad hoc bash script against one or groups of machines.  If that script is something unique to your environment, you can manage it without having to push it back upsteam because Digital Rebar workloads are composable and designed to be safely integrated from multiple sources.

Beyond tweaking running systems, this is fastest script development workflow that I’ve ever seen.  I can make fast, surgical iterative changes to my scripts without having to rerun whole playbooks or runlists.  Even better, I can build multiple operating system environments side-by-side and test changes in parallel.

For secure environments, I don’t have to hand out user SSH access to systems because the actions run in Digital Rebar context.  Digital Rebar can limit control per user or tenant.

I’m very excited about how this capability can be used for dev, test and production systems.  Check it out and let me know what you think.