Rackspace has announced that Dreadnot, a Node.js application aimed at helping software developers better monitor their projects as they are deployed, will be open-source.  The goal of Dreadnot is to facilitate a continuous development methodology that allows developers to implement needed features as they become available, without suffering through interruptions in service.

Dreadnot lists the tasks that need to be accomplished to roll out a given piece of software and defines how the deployment works and what code is deployed. If there is a snafu, the work is redirected, the problem process is stopped, and the developers are alerted.

-- Barb Darrow

The obvious advantage here is that each separate piece of software has its own task list explaining everything that needs to be done before it can be deployed, allowing for easier continuous deployment.

Rather than deploying less frequently with more manual testing, we deploy more frequently, relying upon a culture of test-driven development, code review and extensive quality assurance automation to catch bugs early and minimize service interruptions.  Our maxim is that a new engineer should be able to push code into production on their first day on the job.

-- Paul Querna

Querna, a Rackspace engineer working on the cloud monitoring team, says the internal developers at Rackspace tried using Etsy's Deployinator, the inspiration for Dreadnot, but they soon discovered that it lacked the open-source tools necessary for multisite deployments and required each department to create multiple customizations just to make it work.

The problem with devops is that everyone talks about it but not very many are doing tooling to help us do it. That’s why we developed and open sourced Dreadnot.

-- Paul Quema

Dreadnot, built on the Express web framework using Twitter's Bootstrap JavaScript and CSS utilities, is one of the first in what many hope to be a new wave of tools designed specifically around DevOps.