Specter – Interaction at a distance and ghostly validation for your cloud environment.

The initial name of that project was Poltergeist, suggesting interaction at a distance. That name described the intent of the project back then: To execute SSH and SCP command to a diverse set of clustered hosts and remote services. Add to that the usage of high availability clusters and that initial name make perfect sense.

That need evolve through time. Typically, the maintenance of such complex ecosystem is a shared responsibility. For any major project, multiple remote teams on different time zone are involve. Communication and coordination can be an issue in such setting, resulting in glitches and hiccups. According to Murphy’s law, one of these days, an issue that was not supposed to happen will caught you off guard. One way to prevent this to happen is to proactively validate the environment. Don’t expect what you don’t inspect.

Specter suggest a menace and the anticipation of danger. It better describes the intent of this toolset: To automate validation in a highly distributed and somewhat unstable system.