Overview

Simian is an enterprise-class Mac OS X software deployment solution with Google App Engine-based hosting to scale with the needs of your growing enterprise, and a future proof client based on the Munki open-source project.

Simian provides an entire server, ready to run on App Engine, which Munki clients connect to.

Running on App Engine provides multiple benefits:

• Scaling to N number of clients is automatic; as your Mac fleet grows, so does App Engine.
• No deployment or management of additional infrastructure in your organization is required; App Engine is hosted entirely on Google's servers.
• Clients can connect globally using any Internet connection, without needing a VPN or corporate network changes to expose services.

Additionally, Simian offers you a dynamic, programmed server capable of adapting to clients, rather than a static server of files. Because of this:

• Simian can generate software manifests dynamically, on the fly, based on client properties.
• The administration overhead of static manifest management is removed.
• Any possible customizations to client software offerings are possible by modifying the server.

In summary, here is the current feature set of Simian:

• Deploy new or updated software by targeting a single Mac or tens of thousands.
• Deploy updates whether the Mac is on an internal network/VPN or not.
• Force unattended/background installation of some packages, while allowing others to be optional.
• Forcefully deploy security patches and reboot Macs after a given date, with varying levels of warning notifications.
• Tightly manage Apple Software Update catalogs and update release, or let updates auto-promote automatically.
• Dynamically target clients based on user, hostname, os version, and more.
• Obtain reports on all of this and the fleet overall.

Much of this and more is due to the outstanding work of Greg Neagle and the Munki community. To read more about the other features Munki offers please visit the Munki code.google.com project page.

Getting Started

Please refer to the Wiki documentation for instructions on how to download, configure, build, and deploy Simian.

Screen Shots

The Simian dashboard gives you an overview of your fleet:

The Apple Software Update Catalog Admin gives you tight control over which updates make it to which machines in your fleet:

Office Hours

The Simian engineering team will host office hours every other Monday from 11am to 1pm Eastern Time. Office hours are available as a video conference via Google+ Hangout, or on the irc network freenode. Feel free to use or not use a webcam for the hangout.

Join the Google+ Hangout (with Extras) here:

https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/extras/talk.google.com/google-corpeng

We will simultaneously be present on freenode in:

#google-corpeng

Our next office hours will be on Monday February 27th 2012.

Upcoming Features

Preview! https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/simian-discuss/Tw8nYrHA6jA

• Browser-based Package Administration
• Upload new packages, modify metadata, promote/demote tracks, etc. all from the browser, without the MPCC CLI.

• Advanced Apple Software Update support, including unattended and forced updates.
• Munki still prompts for installation of all Apple Software Update updates. We'd like to give admins more control over how and when these updates are installed. ETA 2012-Q1.

• Enhance reporting interface.
• We've worked a bit on the admin and reporting interface, but we plan to invest more time on this in the near future. ETA 2012-Q1.

• Four-eyes approval for package changes.
• Would you like two different admins to approve a push before it goes live? We plan on making that possible soon.

• Digital package signatures.
• One step beyond package hash verification.