The First Law of IT Automation
What does a building architect hand off to a builder? Not a list of step-by-step instructions—that would be impossibly detailed and (impossible to revise).
Instead, the architect creates a blueprint: a detailed, comprehensive picture of how the finished building should look, inside and out. Then engineers work backwards from the blueprint to plan and execute detailed construction steps.
Blueprints enable:
- Reproducibility—Given an up-to-date blueprint for any component, it’s possible to make a copy of that component. To build a copy of a house, you really need a blueprint for the house, not the house itself.
- Revision—In the context of a blueprint, it’s easy to describe and validate changes. “Add a door here. Whoa, scratch that—it will block the other doorway.”
- Review—Unlike the opaque components they describe, blueprints are auditable and reportable. “Glad we reviewed the blueprint before construction—it was too close to the street, so the city would have made us take it down.”
Models, or blueprints, occur almost everywhere in design and engineering. But strangely, they are rare in IT.
So, we have:
rPath’s First Law of Automation: Create comprehensive blueprints for every aspect of software systems, and use the blueprints to drive all change.
That’s the difference between a simple version-control repository and rPath system version control. rPath provides deep modeling—blueprints—for services, systems, applications, and OS components. Those blueprints enable reproducibility, revision, and review for IT systems—speeding change and massively reducing risk.
Who knows, they might even keep the city from bulldozing your house.
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[...] top of raw system artifacts (such as packages and configuration files), rPath layers several unique system modeling concepts. Here’s how two of the most important concepts at rPath—blueprints and [...]