Introduction

Dux is an automation engine turned into a Rust library. By automation, we mean orchestration / configuration management (call it an Ansible-like tool), basically something that ensures a given host meets a certain state.

Objective

The goal of the Dux project is to let developers easily "build their own Ansible" and integrate it in a already existing codebase.

Just like you would import the tonic crate in your code and start using it to make gRPC calls to support your business logic, you can import Dux in your Rust project and adapt its usage to your situation.

You want the legacy way (one binary running on a master node and having remote root access to everything through SSH) ? You can build that.
You prefer not to open ports and SSH servers everywhere and let hosts regularly fetch a configuration from some git repo somewhere and apply it to themselves ? You can also built that.
You need to handle large numbers of hosts and want to scale ? You can split the work between controllers and workers, put a message broker in the middle and have many workers behind it handling your hosts. And if you already have a message broker deployed somewhere, just use this one instead of deploying a new one. You are more of a gRPC fan ? No problem. Serialize the work and move it as a Protobuf String !

This book

This book consists of 2 main parts :

• the engine : the dux crate (usage, types, ...)
• examples of how to use it in different scenarios