Confluent is an infrastructure management platform designed to simplify the deployment and operation of large groups of servers. It combines hardware management, operating system provisioning, remote console access and infrastructure automation within a common management environment.
The software supports both stateful and stateless deployments, making it suitable for conventional servers as well as clusters where machines boot into centrally managed operating system environments. It provides facilities for configuring deployment profiles and applying system-specific customisations during different stages of the boot and installation process.
Confluent also manages hardware through interfaces such as IPMI and Redfish. Administrators can control power states, configure boot devices, inspect hardware health and access remote consoles without switching between separate management utilities.
The platform is designed for scale. Group-based configuration, inherited attributes and collective management facilities allow administrators to control large numbers of machines while maintaining consistent settings. Confluent is the xCAT Consortium’s recommended long-term successor to xCAT.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Supports stateful and stateless operating system deployments.
- Provides network-based and media-based operating system provisioning.
- Manages remote consoles with logging, session sharing and terminal buffering.
- Supports hardware power management through IPMI, Redfish and compatible integrations.
- Provides configuration of boot devices and supported firmware settings.
- Collects hardware health information and telemetry.
- Supports device discovery and onboarding using identifiers and network information.
- Uses inherited group attributes for consistent infrastructure configuration.
- Provides flexible node-range expressions for managing groups of servers.
- Supports automation through command-line tools, Python interfaces and a REST API.
- Provides facilities for scaling management across multiple servers.
- Supports secure management communications using TLS and additional hardware security mechanisms.
Website: github.com/xcat2/confluent
Support:
Developer: xCAT Consortium
License: Apache License 2.0
Confluent is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Server Provisioning | |
|---|---|
| FAI | High quality tool for fully automatic installation of Linux systems |
| Foreman | Life cycle systems management tool |
| Cobbler | OS provisioning and profile management |
| m23 | Software distribution and management system |
| MAAS | Data centre automation platform |
| Confluent | Handle essential bootstrap and operation of scale-out server configurations |
| xCAT | Extreme Cluster Administration Toolkit |
| OpenQRM | Systems management platform |
| Uyuni | Configuration and infrastructure management solution |
| Warewulf | Stateless, network-boot cluster provisioning system |
| Tinkerbell | Bare metal provisioning engine |
| Ironic | OpenStack service for managing and provisioning bare metal servers |
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