Yesterday, StackStorm announced the release of StackStorm 0.5, an open source software solution for operations automation.  To find out more about the company and the new release, I spoke with Evan Powell, co-founder and CEO. 

VMblog:  Can you start off by giving readers a little background on StackStorm?

Evan Powell:  Dmitri Zimine, the former director of R&D and cloud infrastructure at VMware, and I founded StackStorm in 2013 with the vision of creating a truly self-driving data center. StackStorm is sometimes described as the wiring for your Legos - tying together and making sense out of the many loosely coupled components of today's IT environments.  Since coming out of stealth in May, our software has been available in private beta and we've learned a huge amount about both the power of operations automation and the challenges to its adoption.  Now, we are thrilled to open source StackStorm 0.5, which encapsulates much of what we have learned.

VMblog:  What does StackStorm 0.5 provide to users?  And what are its key differentiators?

Powell:  StackStorm 0.5 delivers both automation and the management of that automation, while integrating the broader environment including monitoring, code repositories, chat, ticketing systems, configuration management, security event management, as well as, various compute environments including Amazon, OpenStack and much more.  StackStorm use cases include assisting with continuous integration (CI), continuous deployments (CD), ongoing troubleshooting and remediation.

StackStorm software is different from existing automation solutions and is often complementary to them.  Unlike the special purpose automation that is available for use cases such as automated testing or for simple responses to monitoring events, StackStorm is built to integrate an entire environment and to consume and make sense out of events from these underlying systems.   Having consumed and processed these events - or in response to human input - StackStorm then automates responses, utilizing both a rules engine and, as needed, a powerful set of workflow capabilities. 

Unlike earlier generations of automation software, StackStorm treats all integrations and automation as code and itself is fully automatable.  Incredibly, prior proprietary automation solutions are themselves not automatable - so they don't fit in today's highly automated environments.  Also these proprietary packages are a black hole for your integrations and especially your automations - they suck your operational patterns such as deployment and troubleshooting processes in, and refuse to allow the user to treat this content - their own content - as freely sharable code.  Plus the proprietary automation packages do not have modern architectures and cannot easily scale.  

VMblog:  And explain if you will, how does this software benefit organizations?

Powell:  StackStorm 0.5 helps organizations integrate and automate their environments, without incurring the technical debt, cost and inflexibility of alternatives including in house developed scripts. StackStorm enables enterprises to define and share operational patterns as code, not only within their organization but also with the broader DevOps and OpenStack communities via sites such as StackStorm.com/community.

DevOps environments tend to be comprised of ‘Lego' blocks that can be challenging to tie together in an automated manner. StackStorm software solves the integration challenges and provides a rules engine that can interpret events and take actions on them. By simplifying and tying together tasks such as testing, integration, deployment, monitoring and more, StackStorm 0.5 helps organizations gain the benefits of trusted, transparent automation.  The bottom line is StackStorm should improve the lives of developers and operators by handling much of the routine work of wiring together and maintaining powerful automations.

VMblog:  I've also heard you recently expanded your team as well.  Who are the new additions and what will they be contributing to StackStorm?

Powell:  Yes, we are growing!  Recent additions include James Fryman, former operations hacker at GitHub and before that at PuppetLabs - and a well-known speaker at DevOps events around the world, who has joined the team as a DevOps Stormer.  Also we are happy that Tomaz Muraus joined us recently as a Developer Stormer; Tomas is the project chair of Apache Libcloud and has extensive experience developing software in the DevOps space.  What is more, we have a new addition to our excellent advisory board, Don Jaworski, currently a board member of SwiftStack and a well-regarded leader in the infrastructure space for many years including executive, board and advisory roles at NetApp, Brocade, Sun and a variety of high performing start-ups.

VMblog:  What should we expect from StackStorm in the coming months?

Powell:  We're at OpenStack Summit Paris this week, where we'll be on the first public demo of the now open source StackStorm 0.5 on November 4.  Dmitri and Patrick Hoolboom, one of our DevOps Stormers, are presenting during the #vBrownBag TechTalks as well. If you're attending stop by booth E2 and meet the team.

As for the rest of the year, we're going to keep developing our product, growing our open source ecosystem, pitching in at meet-ups and hackathons in the US and Europe, and contributing further to the OpenStack related workflow as a service project Mistral. Next year will be big for us as we release a GA version of our software, announce an already amazing line-up of initial customers and more, so please in touch.  A good starting point to try the product and otherwise to collaborate with us is StackStorm.com/community.

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Once again, thank you to Evan Powell, co-founder and CEO at StackStorm, for taking time to speak with VMblog.com.