Keeper: A tool for management and automated deployment of CMS web services

The CMS experiment at the CERN LHC runs many web services for different needs. Developers of such services need to learn how to securely configure many other systems like Apache and Shibboleth and to maintain several machines. The Keeper is a tool that is able to automatically, fully deploy projects from scratch in nodes by writing flexible configuration Python scripts in a declarative-looking way by leveraging Python's object-oriented capabilities, removing the complexity for developers. The Keeper also automates logging, monitoring, cronjobs and other assets; and allows to apply actions to them. The classes are reusable for most of CMS' projects, therefore removing the duplication of efforts. Finally, it allows to create hierarchies of projects from different groups to be deployed, eliminating the need for developers to maintain their own machines. While the Keeper was developed for the specific use-cases inside the CMS experiment, its implementation is deliberately agnostic with respect to the environment and can be easily adapted to other uses outside.