Rundeck

Rundeck provides runbook automation software, functioning as an orchestration tool for IT operations, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams. The company was founded in 2013 under the name SimplifyOps Inc. by Damon Edwards, Alex Honor, and Greg Schueler, who were the core minds behind the Rundeck open-source project that began in 2010. The founders have extensive backgrounds in IT operations and DevOps consulting; Edwards, for example, was a managing partner at DTO Solutions and is a prominent figure in the DevOps community.

The platform enables organizations to define, schedule, and execute operational workflows, known as jobs, across disparate infrastructure and tools. This allows for the automation of routine and emergency procedures, such as incident remediation, deployment, and system administration, without requiring direct server access. Rundeck is designed to integrate with a company's existing automation scripts and tools—including Ansible, Puppet, Jenkins, and Kubernetes—acting as a centralized control plane. Key features include distributed command execution, role-based access control for secure delegation of tasks, scheduling, logging for auditing, and a secure key store. This functionality serves to reduce manual toil, shorten incident response times, and allow non-operations staff like developers or customer service to safely run pre-approved tasks.

Rundeck operates on a dual-model basis, offering a free, open-source version and a commercial enterprise product. The open-source software provides core automation capabilities suitable for smaller-scale use. The enterprise version, formerly known as Rundeck Pro and now part of PagerDuty's Process Automation, adds features targeted at large-scale production environments, such as high-availability clustering, advanced workflow controls, and dedicated support. Revenue is generated through subscriptions to this commercial offering. In October 2020, PagerDuty acquired Rundeck for approximately $100 million, integrating its runbook automation capabilities to create a comprehensive digital operations management platform that automates the full incident response lifecycle.

Keywords: runbook automation, IT operations, DevOps automation, incident response, orchestration tool, PagerDuty, self-service operations, job scheduling, infrastructure management, automated workflow, SRE platform, Damon Edwards, Alex Honor, Greg Schueler, SimplifyOps, process automation, configuration management, auto-remediation, open source automation, enterprise job scheduling