Looking for testers for Defuser – an operations runbook generation service!
Looking for testers for Defuser – an operations runbook generation service!
It doesn't look like much yet... but it's functional enough for testers :)
I'm handing out pre-generated keys right now as that will do the trick for testing - so don't worry I'm not asking for your email for signup just yet. Share it as many times as you want! If the service crashes, that's probably a good thing ;)
Anyway that above description is... a bit of a mouthful, right? I worked in DevOps for a while at a Fortune 100 and - as you may imagine - a large chunk of my time was spent fixing things going wrong with our servers. Being developers too, our time was stretched way, way too thin.
"Did you document what you did to fix that server? Where is the documentation? Have you documented it yet? Why haven't you documented it yet!? Why is there a mistake here!? So-and-so couldn't fix it and we had to wake you up" and so on...
I'm sure organizations may refer to these instructions by different names, but where I was they were called runbooks. They were a hodge-podge of screenshots in Word documents with instructions that were always lacking some critical detail uploaded to Box. Always disorganized, occasionally poorly named, often difficult to know which systems or group of systems one was valid for. The pain points were endless.
So I, being the lazy spiteful person I am, decided that this all flat-out sucked. I spent a couple of weeks throwing together Defuser. In simplest terms, it is a web terminal that you can SSH into your fleet from that will record your entire session. You can optionally save the recording, where it then is referred to as a "manual" and you can play these back. The recording is text-based, so you can copy and paste while you are watching!
The future plans are to implement teams, the fleet/inventory function with tagging features so you can tag systems into groups and then tag manuals, making the whole process a lot more awesome. The icing on the cake would be incident reporting, where you can then tie incidents to systems and manuals via tags as well.
So, there's a lot to do, but I think enough to show that someone could imagine where it is going and give some impressions on the core idea.
If you'd like a key to log in, email lucas@defuser.io and I will get you one!
The minimum requirement is that you are familiar with basic SSH and have a host that can be hit from the Internet. If you don't have a host like this or are not comfortable accessing one of them via the service at this point, let me know and I can spin up a throwaway server!
Lucas
I love the idea, and I have so many vhosts. We have created ours by hand. With ours I like to keep the versioning table, then link below to the old data. Which is all strikethrough.
Speaking of versioning... that's a very good point. I hadn't road-mapped that and this was a challenge of ours as well. If you want to try it out let me know (via or email or any other method you like) - It's remarkably unexciting - in a good way, I think - and quick to try if you're interested. I've had so few people in a position to provide quality feedback.