Show HN: Manage servers easily online with Commando.io

by nodesocket • 12 years ago

68 44 12 years ago

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

Founder here. Happy to answer any questions and take feature requests.

  The API is scheduled to be released in June (only for paid plans).
  Providing arguments/dynamic input when executing recipes is coming shortly.
  The ability to create/destroy servers from within Commando.io is also in development.

bradleysmith• 12 years ago

Hey nodesocket,

Just fired up a beta instance as I am quite intrigued by your tool-set. looks very nice on first shine.

Getting some permission errors when trying to get ssh access to an Ubuntu 12.04 server. I'm in touch with y'all via your intercom dashboard.

swalsh• 12 years ago

I think "going commando" is hilarious... but its kind of unprofessional.

deweller• 12 years ago

Looks well designed and thought out.

Can you give me a use case as to when this would be better a better solution than say Chef or Salt?

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

A few things.

Our mantra is simplicity and empowering everybody in a company to interact with servers via an easy to use web interface, this includes less technical employees such as support, marketing, and contractors. Others in the DevOps space are focused on ever increasing complexity and command line systems. Our approach is a beautiful web interface with no external dependencies (agents). Typical configuration management has a steep learning curve and requires expertise and upfront man hours. Going with Chef, Puppet, Ansible, require a large time investment, and companies have to send developers off to Chef school for two weeks to learn their systems. We don’t ask our users to go to school. They can signup and start managing servers instantly with their existing stack (bash, perl, python, ruby, go, or node.js).

jetblackio3• 12 years ago

This looks very nice. Is there any plan to add support for Ansible? Not sure I'm a fan of having bash scripts in the UI which are not available locally (is that the case?). I'd much rather have an Ansible repo in git that I develop locally and push to Commando.io.

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

No plan to support Ansible. However, being able to push/import scripts (we call them recipes) from git into Commando.io is a highly requested feature and on the roadmap. Also, just to clarify, we support recipes in bash, perl, python, ruby, go, or node.js.

jetblackio3• 12 years ago

That's unfortunate. I understand where you are coming from on making this absolutely as simple as possible for those who are maybe not so admin inclined, but I feel it's limiting to actual administrators/devops engineers, who are more than comfortable with traditional config management systems.

Personally as an administrator I want to be able to continue to use Ansible from the command line, but then grant access to my developers to a UI where they can easily spin up instances for temporary use.

That's just my use case. Otherwise, looks like a cool product. Good work.

coreymgilmore• 12 years ago

Pretty cool project. I like the simplicity of it. Definitely bookmarking for the future.

Based on the video, can you run any shell/bash script you can think of? And does this have logging built in?

marketo_cpeng• 12 years ago

I like the UX. CLean, intuitive and to the point. Any plan for a private cloud version?

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

We are working on Commando.io Enterprise, which is self-hosted and comes bundleded as a virtual appliance that runs on VMWare and VirtualBox just like GitHub enterprise. Send us an e-mail enterprise@ our domain to stay in the loop on it.

mahmoudimus• 12 years ago

Congratulations on your launch Justin!

nicpottier• 12 years ago

Looks neat, I might try it out but I don't see any pricing information.

Don't want to invest the time until I know it is something that would match my budget. Is that detailed anywhere?

dewey3• 12 years ago

There's a pricing page once you are signed up: https://<yourusername>.commando.io/pricing

Looks like the smallest plan is $18/month for "12 servers and 5 users". I'd love to see a smaller plan for maybe up to 5 servers. This would be neat to quickly deploy servers for weekend projects etc.

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

Once we roll out of beta, we anticipate having a smaller starter plan, but the price point will be similar, around $8 - $12 a month.

sovande• 12 years ago

If someone manage to break into your server, won't it open up access to all your customer's servers?

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

Each account on Commando.io is sandboxed (dedicated database). They each have their own set of keys with a randomly generated passphrase on the private key which is then AES encrypted and stored in the database. We take security very seriously, read more aout our practices at: https://commando.io/security.html.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

I'm probably misunderstanding, but how is storing a key with an encrypted passphrase different than storing an encrypted key? Shouldn't passphrases be entered by humans?

paulrr• 12 years ago

Although obviously much simpler, I've always been a huge fan of csshx. https://code.google.com/p/csshx/

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

csshx is great but lacks the audit trail (output stored) we offer. Additionally with standard parallel ssh tools, you don't have centralized user access management, and cloud provider integrations.

Pyramids• 12 years ago

Very cool, is there any ETA on parallel execution and background execution (ex: Currently, you have to stay on the page while the recipe executes.)

Additionally, it seems that the more servers you have, the more you pay per server. Our use case would be several sysadmins (less than 5 users) accessing 50+ servers, which would mean we'd be paying ~$3/server/mo, whereas on the lower plan it works out to literally half that, at ~$1.5/server/mo, is pricing already finalized?

Thanks!

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

Thanks. Parallel execution and background will come at the same time. It is the next highest task in the queue after the API is completed. Additionally execution output (both stdout stderr) will stream via websockets, so no more timeouts.

In regards to pricing, our philosophy is the more servers you add, the more value Commando.io provides. Additionally our lower tier plans are discounted heavily since those are catering to smaller organizations, usually running $5 or $10 a month servers on DigitalOcean. With that said, pricing is still being tweaked and tuned, so absolutely open to suggestions.

hardwaresofton• 12 years ago

gorgeous -- curious, what is the backend tech? Fabric +/- stuff like ansible/chef/etc?

NVM - just saw it's MEAN stack based.

dewey3• 12 years ago

Have you thought about adding some features to the group management?

So one could add a new user and then just have checkboxes for all the available groups. This way you could create a user who acts as a DBA and then just give him access to all the servers in the group "DATABASE" without giving him access to all available servers. I'm not sure how feasible that is but I couldn't find anything in the FAQ or the group/users page.

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

Absolutely, group management in terms of users is something we didn't even think about when initially building Commando.io, however its become highly requested. The idea is, Commando.io becomes the source of truth for user access to servers. When you bring on additional employees or contractors simply add them into Commando.io and select which group of servers they can see and interact with. When the employee or contractor leaves, simply delete them from Commando.io. No more adding, removing keys into servers for each employee.

dewey3• 12 years ago

Sounds great, thanks for answering.

rob• 12 years ago

This looks awesome! I was just thinking of something like this the other day. Can't wait to try it. Any chance of being able to import from Linode in addition to DO, EC2, Rackspace, etc?

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

Unfortunately not Linode at this time. DigitalOcean, Amazon Web Services, and Rackspace for now. Based on demand Google Cloud is next.

omarkassim• 12 years ago

Any particular reason for not supporting Linode?

sida• 12 years ago

So how does this compare to Ansible tower which also comes with an web GUI + it is self-hosted

avelis• 12 years ago

Any thoughts on adding an integration for Slack?

I would like to see notifications for the following events:

1. When a recipe (script) is run on a server.

2. Any user administration updates. (Added user, removed user, etc.)

nodesocket14• 12 years ago

We were just thinking about this. Currently we send e-mail notifications on each execution to all users in the account with general details. Hipchat/Slack notifications would be nice. We've created a GitHub issue in our internal tracker for this. Thanks.

http://i.imgur.com/VEoGbqH.png

fancylad• 12 years ago

Not to sound like too much of a jerk but why would someone use this over a real configuration management tool like Ansible, Chef, etc? I see a lot of issues with this:

1. I don't see any templating features 2. There is no idempotentcy 3. Unless you pay for enterprise you have to grant permissions to a cloud service to ssh directly into your nodes. This is a HUGE security issue. Sure I can whitelist your ip but what happens if you guys get hacked?

This doesn't seem all that much better than keeping my shell/python scripts in a git repo and then scp'ing them over to my hosts and executing them with ssh. Prior to proper configuration management tools this was how a lot of unix administration was done. This seems like a giant step backwards, except now I've got a pretty web ui to looks at and I have to grant ssh access over the internet to all my servers.

I'm sorry but I just don't see the value in this.

gibbonsd1• 12 years ago

I use dsh for this: http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/software/dsh.html.en

It's command line, but you can set up groups of servers and execute commands against all of the machines in a group at once.

cheald• 12 years ago

It looks really nice, but I don't think I could justify putting my keys into a third-party's hands. The focus on security is commendable, but at the end of the day, I'm responsible for the security of my company's infrastructure, and if something were to happen, telling the higher-ups that "yeah, we got 0wned because we gave root to a third party that we don't have any control over" is a fast way to be out of a job.

Leaving the keys to the kingdom in the hands of a third party who you can't directly audit or patch is an enormous liability.

alex_doom• 12 years ago

No more dangerous than Meldium: https://www.meldium.com/

kolev• 12 years ago

So, this is like RunDeck (http://rundeck.org/), only hosted.

Show HN: Manage servers easily online with Commando.io

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