Marmot

One line summary

Marmot is a service for processing workflows targeting DevOps/SRE needs.

NOTICE This product is still in development and is not production ready.

The long summary

Marmot is a GRPC service that executes workflow descriptions against infrastructure (network devices, servers, kubernetes pods, ...). This allows top level services/scripts to simply test the output for the correct workflow descriptors instead of complex mocking, concurrency checks, ... This in turn provides code reuse and reduces code duplication. It also provides safety by having a single system responsible for execution and not hundreds of scripts/services. Mamort provides:

• Structured workflow description language with health checks
• Support for concurrency inside workflows
• Plugin architecture allows feature expansion/updates without service rebuilds
• Streaming execution updates
• Clients for Go and Python
• Support for emergency pausing or stopping of all workflows, classes of workflows or single workflows
• Web UI for viewing workflows Marmot is based on an internal Google project which processes tens of thousands of workflows per week for several internal SRE/DevOps organizations.

Use cases

Marmot has been designed as a DevOps/SRE tool for handling infrastructure changes, though it is not limited to this role. Marmot is well suited for any type of operation that must be performed in steps with certain pacing and may require state checks for health. Examples include:

• Updating packages on servers
• Rolling out a new service version on Kubernetes
• Configuration changes to routing infrastructure
• Updating firmware on devices
• Turning up new devices via a mix of BOOTP/Console/SSH
• Automatic acceptance of code changes into a master repository from staging
• ...

Disclaimers

This is not an official Google product.