Overview

Commissaire is a lightweight REST interface for performing system management tasks on network hosts in a cluster through Ansible.

Current capabilities include rolling upgrades and restarts of traditional or “Atomic” hosts, and bootstrapping new hosts into an existing “container management” system such as OpenShift or Kubernetes.

Moving forward, Commissaire will expand the scope of its REST interface to provide centralized host inventory management and consoldate various Linux subsystems into a centralized API.

Feature Overview

• Restart hosts in an OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster
• Upgrade hosts in a OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster
• Bootstrap new hosts into an existing OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster
• No agent required for hosts: All communication is done over SSH
• Simple REST interface for automation
• Service status for health checking
• Plug-in based authentication framework
• Command line interface for operators
• Built in support for Atomic Host and Server variants of RHEL, Fedora, and CentOS

Logical Flow

What commissaire Is Not

There are a lot of overloaded words in technology. It’s important to note what commissaire is not as much as what it is. commissaire is not:

• A Container Manager or scheduler (such as OpenShift or Kubernetes)
• A configuration management system (such as Ansible or Puppet)
• A replacement for individual host management systems

Example Uses

Note

This is an early list. More use cases will be added in the future.

• An administrator needs to upgrade an entire group of hosts acting as Kubernetes nodes
• An administrator needs to restart an entire group of hosts acting as Kubernetes nodes
• An organization would like new hosts to register themselves into a Kubernetes cluster upon first boot without administrator intervention
• An organization would like to keep groups of hosts used as Kubernetes nodes out of direct control of anything but Kubernetes and basic operations.