The Marionette Collective aka. mcollective is a framework to build server orchestration or parallel job execution systems.

Primarily we'll use it as a means to programmatically execute actions on clusters of servers. In this regard we operate in the same space as tools like Func, Fabric or Capistrano.

We've attempted to think out of the box a bit designing this system by not relying on central inventories and tools like SSH, we're not simply a fancy SSH "for loop". MCollective uses modern tools like Publish Subscribe Middleware and modern philosophies like real time discovery of network resources using meta data and not hostnames. Delivering a very scalable and very fast parallel execution environment.

Read the Introduction page for a full introduction about what you can do with mcollective and some of our goals and approaches.

I've recorded a demo that shows the system in use, view the video for a real hands-on view of what this is all about.