Modern DevOps is the story of death by a thousand cuts. You have countless tools to manage — including AWS and all of its separate services (EC2, ECS, RDS, CloudWatch, etc), GitHub, Jenkins, OpenVPN, Terraform, Docker, Packer, DataDog, Loggly, PagerDuty, and so on — and there’s no coherent user experience that ties them all together. Before, your choices were to either use a Platform as a Service (PaaS) that gave you a nice UI, but no ability to control or customize anything, or to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which gave you full control and power over everything, but no nice UI.
At Gruntwork, we’re going to change that. Today, I’m happy to announce that Gruntwork Houston, Mission Control for your infrastructure, is now in beta!
Gruntwork Houston gives you DevOps super powers. On the surface, it’s a simple web interface that your Dev team can use to deploy and manage infrastructure. Under the hood, the web interface and how it manages infrastructure are completely defined and controlled by your Ops team using infrastructure as code.
It’s the best of both worlds: your Dev team gets an easy-to-use, self-service experience, while your Ops team still has all the power and control they need to ensure reliability, security, and compliance. Best of all, Houston runs in your own AWS account (so it can securely access your infrastructure) and is included in the Gruntwork Subscription for no extra fee!
We’re currently testing out Gruntwork Houston with a few customers in a private beta. Some of the first features we’ve released make it 10x easier to access your AWS resources via the web, CLI, VPN, and SSH, including:
Single sign-on to the AWS web console, which allows you to login to any of your AWS accounts using any SAML provider, including Google, ADFS, and Okta.
Single sign-on for AWS CLI tools, which allows you to authenticate CLI tools such as aws, terraform, and packer to your AWS account using any SAML provider (including Google, AWS SSO, ADFS, and Okta) instead of fussing around with access keys, profiles, and STS API calls.
Single sign-on for VPN access, which allows you to access your OpenVPN servers, including self-service VPN certificates! If you use Gruntwork’s Infrastructure as Code Library to deploy an OpenVPN server, your team members can request their own VPN certificates through the Houston UI.
Single sign on for SSH access, which allows you to access your servers over SSH. If you run ssh-grunt from Gruntwork’s Infrastructure as Code Library on your EC2 Instances, your team members will be able to upload their public SSH keys to Houston and then SSH to those EC2 Instances using their own usernames and keys.
Houston is still in early beta, but we’ve heard very positive feedback so far, and we have some amazing features coming soon that tie together CI / CD, Infrastructure as Code, and monitoring, log aggregation, and alerting. If you’re interested in joining the waiting list, email us at info@gruntwork.io.
Get your DevOps superpowers at Gruntwork.io.