System Version Control
rPath provides the industry's only commercial version control platform for deployed software systems. rPath is not a source code management system. Rather, it is an operational management platform that applies the principles and disciplines of source code control to the management of deployable software systems-specifically, system manifests, packages, binaries, policies and configurations. System version control is the technological foundation that ensures systems can be quickly reproduced, patched and updated, rolled back and reported on.
Deep System Modeling
System Version Control provides the industry's first deeply modeled system inventory. This inventory granularly describes the desired state of every file, binary, application component, and software stack on every production system-with complete information about applied policies and dependencies-as version-controlled system manifests. These manifests are actionable models for managing the complete lifecycle of deployed systems, providing an unprecedented degree of transparency for understanding change impact and controlling change.
Hierarchical System Definition
With rPath, IT can dramatically improve standardization, reuse, and management efficiency by defining systems as layered variants of common base platforms. For example, the standard corporate web server stack may start with a standard build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but add a specific custom version of the Apache web server and remove all availability of FTP. rPath enables IT administrators to avoid massively redundant and error-prone patching and application updates across thousands of instances by applying changes once to these base platforms.
Policy-based System Construction and Validation
Over 75% of IT outages are unanticipated consequences of deliberate-but incorrect-system maintenance. rPath enables IT groups to define and automatically enforce build-time policies that govern how systems are constructed. These policies may enforce specific best practices, inject management agents, policies or metadata, or control which versions of software are or are not included. Since policy enforcement and dependency analysis happens before systems are provisioned or updates are applied, rPath guarantees successful deployments and updates.
On-Demand Provisioning
rPath automatically generates virtual machine images, physical disk images, cloud machine templates, and other output formats for easy deployment to any physical, virtual or cloud-based environment. Once rPath has defined a system manifest, generating or reproducing a system image is simple and automated. This reduces the latency associated with system provisioning to dev, test or production environments. It also reduces the cost of VM sprawl by treating images as ephemeral outputs, rather than non-reproducible artifacts that must be archived and managed.
Versioned Software Library
System Version Control stores and controls not only system policies and manifests, but also raw application installers and binaries. This provides the first practical and reliable mechanism for storing and managing the complex library of software that every IT organization maintains.
Automated Dependency Discovery
Developers-particularly in in-house development shops-typically cannot afford the time and effort required to define complete dependency prerequisites for their applications and updates. As such, when rPath imports new or existing software artifacts into System Version Control, it automatically and deeply analyzes each software artifact to discover its entire software supply chain, including OS components, middleware and libraries. This information enables build-time system construction and validation and dramatically reduces the number of maintenance failures and outages that result from missing dependencies and conflicting components.
Intelligent Patching and Updates
rPath surgically updates systems by applying automatically-generated incremental updates to only the components that require change. This ability stems from deep system modeling, dependency knowledge, and optionally JeOS (just enough OS) for minimal system builds. rPath creates a complete system manifest of your system that acts as a blueprint for seamless, automated change. This manifest allows you to deeply understand what software is deployed, which patches and updates apply and what the impact of changes will be. This approach to intelligent updates is faster, safer, and more predictable than traditional forklift upgrades.
Change Automation
A real-world data center has hundreds of applications on thousands of systems with conflicting maintenance windows and complex runtime dependencies. rPath was designed by automation veterans to accommodate these requirements by giving administrators complete control over which updates are promoted to production, on which servers, at controlled times. And, rPath workflow integration ensures that runtime updates leverage existing ticketing systems and change control processes.
Automated Rollback
rPath provides a simple and automated model for rolling systems back to any previous version. This dramatically reduces system downtime and troubleshooting costs and reduces the need to heavily test and certify "one-way" changes by providing a reliable solution for repairing and restoring target systems.
Release Lifecycle Management
rPath ensures stakeholders in each phase of the lifecycle are working from a consistent system definition, eliminating the risk of system "drift" between lifecycle stages and enabling a clean build environment. rPath also provides access control and workflow to ensure controlled and auditable handoff between development, test, staging and production phases of the release lifecycle.
Reporting
rPath provides a rich reporting interface and underlying database framework for understanding system inventory and the release management process. This includes reporting on system inventories, lifecycle stages, process patterns and bottlenecks. rPath reporting is open, extensible, and easily integrated with external reporting systems.
Comprehensive Interfaces (GUI, API, CLI and workflow)
rPath provides a complete set of easy-to-use graphical user interfaces for every stakeholder in the release management process, including release engineers, platform engineers, and system administrators. For power users, rPath includes a flexible command-line interface. For deep integration into the IT ecosystem, all key rPath functionality is accessible programmatically via REST and XML-RPC APIs. And for easy integration into existing change management processes, rPath supports complete inbound and outbound integration into service catalog and run-book automation systems.
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