Foreman Blog

We’ve got Parameterized Class support in Foreman now, and it’ll be in the next release! I’ve recorded a small screencast demonstrating its use:

You can find the mentioned wiki page at wiki:Parameterized_class_support

So I’ve been managing the Debian packages for about 8 months now, and every so often I get asked if there’s anything people can do to help. I have to answer “Not really” because the way we’re building the Debian packages is somewhat arcane.

At least, it was. This blog is to tell you all about how it’s now much more open.

Overview

We started working on a new project to create build and test pipelines for releasing code and running tests, and small, but dense infrastructure arose from working on that project. Instead of keeping the Puppet code locked up, we decided specifically to make it public. There are lots of benefits of doing this, but it made sense specifically for us so others can help manage the infrastructure on an unfettered basis. Lots of other benefits come with public Puppet code, too, like thinking more acutely about storing private information in the repositories and reducing the ability of manual changes to cause issues in the test environment.

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting Foreman 1.0 at redhat offices in Brno, CZ.

It was done during our lunch and learn sessions (people like it becuase you get free pizza or so)  which could explain a few of the interesting background noises during the talk.

as usually, demos don’t work out as planned, but I decided to leave it all, so you can enjoy for yourself.

this by no means its a complete demo of 1.0 features, but maybe a more general overview and its features in 1.0.

many thanks to inecas and lzap for taking care for the details and capturing the talk on video.

Update

There is an updated version of this post available targetting version 1.10. It can be found here

One of foreman goals, is to provide a simple and familiar process to provision systems, regardless of where they are located.

We’ve now added the ability to provision systems in EC2, alongside with the existing virtualization providers such as RHEVM, libvirt, VMWare etc.

In this blog, I’ll try to describe step by step what is required in order to provision a new instance in EC2.