Maintaining cloud infrastructure at enterprise-scale can be a significant challenge as even “simple” maintenance can involve massive work across multiple data centers. That’s why we are so pleased to make Bynar – our automation tool for infrastructure maintenance – available as open source software.

We built Bynar to automate hardware maintenance and replacement processes. Key applications such as Cassandra, Ceph, Gluster, and Hadoop all require routine maintenance that includes replacing pieces of hardware that experience issues. Those changes need to be fast, to prevent degrading performance, but they also need to be reliable and predictable.

Comcast’s Strategic Platform Acceleration and Cloud Engineering (SPACE) Operations team operates Comcast’s private cloud, and provide 24/7 operational support to engineering teams throughout the enterprise.

When it became clear to the SPACE team that they needed a better, more automated way to manage the infrastructure maintenance that is part and parcel to all cloud deployments, they set to work building Bynar.

We use Bynar every day at Comcast, and think it has potential value in any number of cloud environments. We’re excited to make it available to the open source community, and even more excited to see how that community evolves and advances it.

You can learn more about all of our open source projects on our GitHub page https://comcast.github.io/ and check out Bynar at https://github.com/Comcast/Bynar.

(This blog post and Bynar itself would not have been possible without the work of Christopher Holcombe, Principal Engineer, Software Development & Engineering.)