Ask HN: What you use for automating chores (DevOps)

[sverhagen]

We are trying to be good DevOps practitioners and are looking at automating a lot of small tasks for our cloud software that now come in as distractions. Think of tasks like:

- Move tenant to different region - Provision SAML for a tenant - Cleanup data for an expired trial customer - Et cetera

Ideally, there's some user interface that can be used throughout the company to make such requests, something that schedules the tasks, and executes them (e.g. as Docker containers in Kubernetes). We are now contemplating building the management and scheduling of these tasks ourselves. While the tasks themselves will be scripts specific/custom to our setup, it seems there must be existing products out there that do the management and scheduling well; I'd love to hear what y'all are using!

[subway]

Jenkins. It isn't a spectacular interface, but it gets the job done.

[kusmi]

I once wrote a thing that would take text files uploaded to the alfresco ecm, containing run options or data input for some automation script sitting on a server that's part of the corporate subnet, and depending on how the text file was tagged or which folder it was in, it would create service and timer unit files for systemd. The files would sync to the server via alfresco's atom API, and any output generated would be uploaded back into alfresco. This was neat because you could make alfresco user accounts for these bots, thereby turning them on or off for any project by simply adding the user and further modify which directories should be crawled for tasks to run by assigning read permissions to the bot account all via the client side alfresco share interface. Server images containing the bot code could be provisioned in say AWS, and integrated into an alfresco cluster. It made it much simpler for allowing non-technical users to run scheduled web crawlers, pipe them into document formatters, for web publication, or attach to email out the results hot to a given email list all from the nice alfresco share interface.

[imauld]

> as Docker containers in Kubernetes

Kubernetes supports this natively with the `Job` and `CronJob` API objects. Putting a web frontend in front of the k8s API shouldn't be too hard provided you have a frontend engineer available. If you already have a cluster available that is.

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/jo...

https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/workloads/controllers/cr...

[mattbillenstein]

Although I think it's bigger in the data-eng space, no reason Airflow couldn't do this. We have a single-instance Airflow box running most of our periodic jobs just as simple bash commands usually wrapping python scripts -- this works pretty well.

[sverhagen → mattbillenstein]

This turns out a great solution, Airflow ticks a lot of boxes for us, and we are likely pursuing that option. Thank you!

[dmannorreys]

Jenkins. We use it to manage our automation of Jira and our tests. It is also where we manage other teams automation integrating our team's automation framework.

[assafmo]

Start with something simple like Cron jobs and then when it works make it robust and reliable

[Samon]

Rundeck