Rudder Review

Rudder is an easy to use, web-driven, role-based solution for IT Infrastructure Automation and Compliance. With a focus on continuously checking configurations and centralising real-time status data, Rudder can show a high-level summary (“ISO 27001 rules are at 100%!”) and break down noncompliance issues to a deep technical level (“Host prod-web-03: SSH server configuration allows root logins”). A few things that make Rudder stand out: - A simple framework allows you to extend the built-in rules to implement specific low-level configuration patterns, however complex they may be, using simple building blocks (“ensure package installed in version X,” “ensure file content,” “ensure line in file,” etc.). A graphical builder lowers the technical level required to use this. - Each policy can be independently set to be automatically checked or enforced on a policy or host level. In Enforce mode, each remediation action is recorded, showing the value of these invisible fixes. - Rudder works on almost every kind of device, so you’ll be managing physical and virtual servers in the data center, cloud instances, and embedded IoT devices in the same way. - Rudder is designed for critical environments where a security breach can mean more than a blip in the sales stats. Built-in features include change requests, audit logs, and strong authentication. - Rudder relies on an agent that needs to be installed on all hosts to audit. The agent is very lightweight (10 to 20 MB of RAM at peak) and blazingly fast (it’s written in C and takes less than 10 seconds to verify 100 rules). Installation is self-contained, via a single package, and can auto-update to limit agent management burden. - Rudder is a true and professional open source solution—the team behind Rudder doesn’t believe in the dual-speed licensing approach that makes you reinstall everything and promotes open source as little more than a “demo version.” Rudder is an established project with several 10000s of node managed, in companies from small to biggest-in-their-field. Typical deployments manage 100s to 1000s of nodes. The biggest known deployment in 2016 is about 7000 nodes.