AntDepo Manual

This manual contains information about installing, using, learning concepts and running the AntDepo software. The manual also includes information about the AntDepo tasks and types.

AntDepo is a flexible distributed command dispatching framework that enables you to break complex management processes down into reusable generic commands. Each node where management processes must be executed has the AntDepo software installed.The AntDepo framework manages dependencies between commands and allows you to assemble fine-grained commands into more complex procedures that can be executed across machines.

AntDepo is useful for:

• Tool automation
• Application build and release management
• Executing complex procedures over sets of distributed components

Managing distributed applications environments is difficult largely because they are spread over machines, are based on interconnected components, have specific runtime ordering requirements, and need to change according to software release activity. Typically, the folks that manage these environments try to cope with these issues by automating parts of the process to setup and maintain individual components, push files to the machines, and remotely execute scripts. Several problems arise though due to the complex nature of distributed application environments. Since application components depend on each other, the process to roll them out, configure, start, validate, etc., must be performed in a specific order. Also, these integrated systems tend to have a pattern of installation and configuration, the pattern varying based on application release and/or machine and network differences. These differences often lead to scripts and configurations that only work in one environment making them inflexible and hard to reuse by other groups.

AntDepo acts as a control harness for managing distributed management processes. It provides a framework to create executable modular control workflows to manage the release of application deployments, both individually, and as coherent integrated systems. Features of the harness include:

• Command dispatching: all a simple, logical command name and the framework calls the correct sequence of local or distributed automation. This also lets you separate the implementation of each command, so that a change in a command's implementation won't break a workflow and a change in a workflow won't break a command's implementation.
• Distributed execution: when needed, transparently executes procedures on local or remote machines, enabling host and network abstraction
• Templatized actions: Templatize your procedures to remove values that either change often or would differ from environment-to-environment.
• Built on Ant: plug in existing ant build files as named commands. AntDepo provides many useful tasks to create sophisticated control harnesses

As an automation and control framework, AntDepo provides the following benefits:

• Reduces the number of management scripts by consolidating them into reusable libraries.
• Reduces complexity of scripts by parameterizing them with operational data
• Simplifies how management actions are tied together to implement multi-step procedures.

AntDepo is opensource and grew out of work from the ControlTier Software automation solutions.