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ControlTier Automates Application Deployment and Management

Open Source Automation for Demanding Web Operations

Are you automating complex deployment and management procedures?
Do you need to deploy code, data, and content as one integrated release?
Do you need to provide self-service build and deployment capabilities to various development, QA, or production groups?
Looking to achieve Continuous Deployment to complete your Continuous Integration loop?

ControlTier is a fully open source system for automating service management activities across multiple servers and multiple application tiers (code, data, configuration, and content). Common uses for ControlTier include deploying applications, controlling their state, and running on-demand administrative tasks across multiple servers. ControlTier is cross platform and works equally well with physical servers, virtual machines, or cloud computing infrastructure.

The ControlTier project was born out of the project maintainers' collective experiences deploying and managing large scale application infrastructure for top e-commerce, software-as-a-service, and financial services companies. The consultants of ControlTier, Inc. actively keep the project moving forward, but any developers or systems administrators are invited to join the ControlTier community and to participate as users and/or code contributors. Everything we do is licensed under either the GPL v2 or Apache License v2 (depending on the component).

Visit the ControlTier Wiki

Be sure to check out the wiki for documentation, demos, downloads, and other ControlTier information. The What is ControlTier? page on the wiki is a good place to start. Also, don't forget to sign up for the mailing list.

(Currently, a few people are having trouble accessing the wiki from certain networks. The bug has been logged on SourceForge. If you are experiencing this issue, please comment on the bug. A known workaround is to be logged into a SourceForge account when you access the wiki. Https seems to not have this issue. If you don't have a SourceForge account, signing up or using OpenID is easy.)

ControlTier Features include:

**Distributed Command Dispatching Framework**
	ControlTier provides an all purpose automation framework that helps you leverage your current scripts and tools to easily automate any kind of distributed systems management or application provisioning task. Features include: Execute and track sophisticated procedures in distributed environments Comes with pre-built utilities and automation libraries for common technologies and operations procedures Define your own automation using whatever tools/languages you already know Cross platform administration (Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD)

**Self-Service Interfaces to Automation**
	ControlTier includes graphical tools to define, schedule, and execute automation. These interfaces are also highly useful for delegating tasks to lesser skilled or non-technical staff. Handy alternative to the command line interfaces Includes a built-in job scheduler Safely delegate deployment and management tasks to any user who has sufficient permissions Anyone in your organization can follow in real time the execution of important jobs

**Reports and Audits**
	ControlTier tracks operational activity as it happens and generating historical reports. ControlTier collects activity events from: Automation executed from either the web or command line interfaces Scheduled jobs Changes to the automation definitions or data model

**ControlTier: part of an open source "fully automated provisioning" toolchain**
	“Fully automated provisioning” is the ability to deploy, update, and repair your complete application infrastructure -- from "bare-metal" provisioning to integrated application services -- using only pre-deﬁned automated procedures. ControlTier and Puppet both play integral parts in an emerging open source toolchain for fully automated provisioning. Its not uncommon for ControlTier users to also be Puppet users (ControlTier, Inc. consultants liberally use both). Puppet is a handy tool for system-level configuration management and compliance. ControlTier is a handy tool for deploying applications, controlling their state, and running on demand administrative tasks across multiple servers. Puppet makes sure that each OS instance is installed and configured as expected; then ControlTier gives you push-button deployment and service control capabilities for the applications your deploy across those OS instances. Both tools are open source. Both share the same philosophy of specification (or policy) driven provisioning. For more information on fully automated provisioning and the open source toolchain, see this whitepaper The ControlTier and Puppet page on the ControlTier wiki is regularly updated with new information.