IT automation has fundamentally changed the way teams manage infrastructure, whether cloud or on-premise. Automation’s potential for increasing efficiency, speed, and accuracy is immense and well-documented. However, even the most successful IT automation initiatives face adoption barriers, including complexity, security risks and the need for specialised skills to get automation projects off the ground. It’s clear that some assistance is needed.
Enter Kriten, our API-driven execution environment, which is designed to address these common challenges and make IT automation more accessible for teams of all sizes.
How Does Kriten Support IT Automation?
In the simplest terms, Kriten is a platform that simplifies running code in your chosen environment. Having worked in IT automation for several years, we know all too well the struggles teams face. That’s why we developed Kriten to address some of the major automation inhibitors.
First, Kriten allows you to leverage your knowledge. After all, the people best placed to automate systems are the ones who run them. Running code in enterprise environments, setting up servers, installing dependencies and providing access take time and expertise. The good news is that Kriten streamlines the process significantly, as code is made available to run within two commands (well, three if you include logging in).
Kriten also allows you to share your knowledge securely. It’s understandable that you feel uncomfortable with the idea of giving system-level privileges to everyone who interacts with your infrastructure. Unfortunately, this did have the potential to limit access to automation routines—but not anymore. Kriten jobs are launched from a job-specific URL, meaning users have no access to code, usernames, system accounts or secret data.
But that’s not all. Kriten allows you to use what you have with central control because it is language-agnostic. Anything that can be run in a container can be run on Kriten, regardless of the language or platform you’re using. Even better, there’s no need to write API code because Kriten does it for you.
Kriten in Action: Common Use Cases
We’ve outlined the key features that make Kriten a user-friendly platform for enabling IT automation. Now, let’s explore Kriten in action. Our API-driven code execution platform allows you to do the following:
Run Ansible playbooks
Ansible is a popular IT automation and orchestration tool, and thanks to Kriten, all existing playbooks can be enabled as self-service without giving access to playbooks, custom modules and secrets.
Run Python scripts
Kriten also allows you to run Python scripts. For those who may be unfamiliar, Python is a general-purpose language often used by infrastructure engineers to write automation routines. Kriten lets engineers share access to these scripts easily—without exposing secrets or the source code.
Integrate with Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service
The beauty of Kriten is that it can be integrated with various containerisation platforms, including Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). EKS is a managed Kubernetes service that makes it easier to run Kubernetes on-premises and AWS. The platform automatically manages the availability and scalability of the Kubernetes control plane nodes responsible for scheduling containers, storing cluster data, managing application availability and more.
DevOps and Infrastructure teams can autonomously deploy Kriten using dedicated Helm charts, ensuring each team gets a distinct and secure URL for Kriten. If you are interested in using Kriten on EKS, we’ve published a how-to guide to get you started here.
Simplify data center automation
Kriten is also helpful for data center automation. Manually managing a data center can be challenging and may result in misconfigurations and inconsistencies. While automation provides those in charge of managing data centers with reliability and repeatability, many automation solutions demand significant set-up time to function properly.
Kriten offers a more streamlined approach to accelerate your data center automation efforts. If you’re considering automating aspects of your data center, you’re in luck. We’ve written a recipe explaining how to use Kriten to do this—you can find it here.
Provide secure access to third-party contractors
One of our clients, a prominent American multinational corporation with a broad portfolio of financial products and services, relies on third-party contractors to maintain its IT infrastructure. Contractors needed access to some privileged areas of the system to manage updates, troubleshoot issues and retrieve information.
Kriten allowed our client to run jobs from an API call. Following the least-privilege approach, Kriten allowed them to develop Ansible playbooks and load them as Kriten tasks—third-party contractors couldn’t view code, accounts or secrets. By using Kriten, our client saw a significant reduction in third-party contractor infrastructure requests, saving everybody time. If you’d like to learn more about Kriten in action, please read the full case study here.
Try Kriten Today
Kriten, our API-driven code execution platform, allows for easy system integration and makes IT automation more straightforward. The platform simplifies code execution, ensures secure sharing of automation routines, and integrates seamlessly with existing platforms, helping teams overcome the common IT automation challenges that hold them back.
Try Kriten today to break through some of the main barriers to IT automation adoption. You can also find Kriten on GitHub, along with a straightforward installation guide. Alternatively, Kriten is available on Civo Marketplace. So, if you’re a Civo user currently or you’re considering using the platform, you can now simplify IT automation by creating a Civo Kubernetes cluster.