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CTL Features
- Distributed execution: when needed, transparently executes procedures on local or remote machines, enabling host and network abstraction. Jump to → Distributed management
- Command dispatch: call a named command and the framework dispatches it to the underlying module. This also lets you separate the implementation of each command. Jump to → Framework
- Command sequencing: Define a series of commands to run in a sequence with configurable success and error handlers. The success and error handlers can invoke notification or call another command or workflow.
- Self documenting: CTL modules are declared in an XML file that supports automatic website generation via Apache Forrest. You can extend this documentation using your own doc tags. Jump to → Runbooks.
- Data-driven commands: Make your procedures data-driven to remove values that either change often or would differ from environment-to-environment.
- Parallel execution: The CTL shell tool and its built-in workflow allows you to execute actions in multiple threads enabling concurrency
- Extensible: The framework is made to be extended via the modules (packaged sets of commands), as well as, extensions (libraries of modules). CTL is "multi-lingual" allowing you to define command implementation in a variety of languages: unix shell, windows batch, and scripting langauges like ruby, python, groovy, javascript. Jump to → Writing a module
- Cross-platform: CTL is written in Java and includes a set of libraries to provide cross platform utilities useful to CTL module developers.
- Object orientation: CTL modules support an inheritance model and the concept of instance data. Jump to → CTL objects
- Security: CTL has the option of restricting access to command execution for all defined commands. This is done via a fine grained ACL configuration along with an LDAP repository where user roles are defined.
As an automation and control framework, CTL provides the following benefits:
- Modularizes management scripts by consolidating them into reusable libraries.
- Reduces complexity of scripts and makes them more resusable by parameterizing them with operational data
- Simplifies how management actions are tied together to implement multi-step procedures via workflows.
- Scales up for use in large organizations.
If you are an Ant user, be sure to check out: CTL for Ant pages.
If you are a Maven user, be sure to check out: CTL for Maven pages.