A New Intuit Open Source Release: DSE Pronto
Intuit engineers Ben Covi and Nancy Li are excited to launch DSE Pronto. DSE Pronto is an “IaaS” automation suite for deploying and managing DataStax Cassandra clusters in AWS.
DSE Pronto is a framework of automation tools used to deploy and manage DataStax Cassandra clusters in AWS. Intuit engineers Ben Covi and Nancy Li developed the repository after finding no third-party suite of similar tools existed to support self-managed clusters. There are fully managed solutions such as Amazon Keyspaces and DataStax Astra, but DSE Pronto represents a collection of configurable tooling for users who want to own their infrastructure.
Scaling and restacking a Cassandra cluster can be challenging. DSE Pronto collects years of cluster management experience, and solves many problems with automation. It uses Hashicorp’s Packer and Terraform (both open source) for building images and deploying resources in AWS; both of these tools support other cloud providers as well, which should allow the framework to be extended into Azure or GCP. Red Hat’s Ansible (also open source) is used to conduct runtime configuration management over SSH connections.
All of the above tools are built into a Docker image, which can then be used to run every phase of deployment from the orchestration platform of your choice (Jenkins, CodeBuild/CodeDeploy, Bamboo, GitLab, Spinnaker).
These elements are all well understood, given the open source nature, maturity, and wide distribution of the tools involved. But a framework tying everything together using best practices is something new, and hopefully useful. Ben started by releasing DSE Pronto internally at Intuit via InnerSource, and the user community has grown quickly. He hopes open sourcing will help it to grow even further.
