History of Lokahi
Lokahi is the result of several years of web infrastructure management at Merck & Co., Inc. Over these years, the number of servers, the number of applications, and the complexity of configurations grew enormously, and grew faster than the staff dedicated to supporting them. The web infrastructure team developed a series of solutions for infrastructure management, culminating with the release of Lokahi as an Apache Incubator project.
In 2001, when Tomcat was implemented at Merck, infrastructure managers there modified the administration tool that came with it to create mrkuser. This tool, customized for Merck, allowed a single administrator to manage each JVM with its own console. Application teams needed to request all tasks to be performed by that administrator. www.merckvaccines.com was the first site managed this way. Soon after, a stripped down version of mrkuser, called mrkadmin, was provided. Using mrkadmin, application owners could manage certain tasks for their own applications.
With the introduction of Linux to Merck in October 2002, the infrastructure grew from a handful of server pools to several dozen. A new means of infrastructure management was needed, and the Tomcat Management Console (TMC) was developed to meet this need. TMC could manage all the JVMs on all the server pools from a single console. However, like its precessecors, TMC managed only Tomcat; an assortment of scripts and tools performed other infrastructure maintenance, such as deploying content and creating new sites.
The desire to manage as much of the infrastructure as possible from one central tool led to the development of TMCg2 in August 2003. This initially stood for "Tomcat Management Console generation 2", to indicate the radical changes from the original TMC. When infrastructure managers determined that it would manage Apache and other aspects of the infrastructure in addition to just Tomcat, the long version of the name was dropped, and the tool was dubbed simply "TMCg2". TMCg2 was a major improvement over TMC, possessing the ability to manage more of the infrastructure, automate tasks, and perform configurations on the fly. It also enabled users to view application logs and virtual host configurations. While developers completed TMCg2, it was run as an infrastructure management tool alongside TMC for application management.
By October 2005, TMCg2 was in use to provide command and control to nearly all of Merck's enterprise web environment and Merck decided to contribute TMCg2 to the open source community. Shortly thereafter, TMCg2 was accepted with the new name Lokahi as an Apache Incubator project.