Mentoring Projects

This page details potential projects and their mentors, for participants of internship programs such as Google Summer of Code, Outreachy, and so forth. Each program will have its own requirements and application process - this page simply lists the currently available projects.

I’m interested - how can I get familiar with Foreman?

• Install Foreman on a virtual machine or your own computer
• Skim through the manual
• Watch a few demo videos
• Read a couple posts from the forum
• Join us on Matrix.org:
  • #theforeman for generally getting to know Foreman and asking user questions
  • #theforeman-dev for development/mentoring questions. Don’t be shy; tell us you’re interested in one of our open mentoring projects

Open Projects

Puppet Forge and Foreman

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: Integration of Puppet Forge into Foreman
• Knowledge prerequisite: Familiarity with Ruby, configuration management. Experience with infrastructure a plus
• Skill level: Medium
• Contacts:
• Mentor(s): Daniel Lobato Garcia
• Notes: In a similar way to what Foreman is doing now to pick up provisioning templates from the community, I believe we could take advantage of the Puppet Forge to allow users to use modules from there. Importing these modules into a new model, and importing the puppet classes into Foreman should be achievable by a motivated participant with help from the community. This will allow Foreman users to configure their hosts without having to worry about keeping repositories for modules already in the Puppet Forge.

Multi-host deployments in the Foreman

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: Multi-host deployments support in the Foreman
• Knowledge prerequisite: Familiarity with Ruby, configuration management. Experience with infrastructure a plus
• Skill level: Medium
• Contacts:
• Mentor(s): Ivan Nečas
• Notes: The Foreman already knows how to take an unconfigured machine and turn it into something useful. In real life, however, often there is need to configure more hosts to do something useful. It seems like natural step to teach Foreman how to orchestrate multi-host applications. You have already hostgroups for web server, database server, load balancer? After this effort, Foreman will put all the pieces to together for you as well. And since Foreman is life-cycle management system, it should support also ongoing operations, such as rolling updates etc.

Compute resource (virtualization) benchmarks

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: Benchmark compute resources, graph them and use this information in Foreman.
• Knowledge prerequisite: Familiarity with Ruby, configuration management. Experience with infrastructure a plus.
• Skill level: Medium
• Contacts:
• Mentor(s): Daniel Lobato Garcia
• Notes: Compute resources could be expensive. Whether you are managing your own virtualization resources with Ovirt, or you’re using EC2 in Amazon, currently Foreman does not offer you a way to check what are the utilization stats for this. We should offer a way for users to do this and graph this information. This information can be also used to scale up and down your instances, using some policies like keeping track of energy savings, morning-night usage, etc..
• Internal Note: It would be useful to track compute resources usage per host group.

Host health checks

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: Hosts list and single host view in Foreman need to show health checks and possibly alarms.
• Knowledge prerequisite: Familiarity with Ruby and monitoring/alarm systems.
• Skill level: Medium-high
• Contacts:
• Mentor(s): Daniel Lobato Garcia
• Notes: We claim Foreman does monitoring, but in reality it’s tracking very little information (Puppet reports and facts about the machine) compared to how it could be. It would be great if we could build upon Nagios, Ganglia and other monitoring systems to add a health checks layer to our hosts view. In addition to that we could add some alerting to notify users when something is wrong with their hosts.

Foreman-as-a-service

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: Multi-tenancy hosted instance of Foreman in the cloud
• Knowledge prerequisite: Ruby on Rails
• Skill level: Medium
• Contacts:
• Mentor(s): needs new mentor
• Proposer(s): Joseph Magen, Ohad Levy
• Notes: We want to offer a way for new users to Foreman to have a low-barrier entry way to start playing with Foreman and spin up some VMs in several compute resources such as Rackspace, EC2 and Google Compute Engine. This would be a non-full featured version of Foreman to encourage users to install a full featured Foreman version.

Post-installation import

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: After running foreman-installation, all resources should be imported into Foreman to continuously manage the host
• Knowledge prerequisite: Ruby, Puppet
• Skill level: Medium
• Contacts: Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden
• Mentor(s):

• Notes: The installer is a wrapper around a set of puppet modules combined with answers, which are just puppet parameters. Foreman manages Puppet modules and their parameters. If those modules were imported into an environment, all answers converted to a parameter and applied to a host or hostgroup the user could easily change the configuration afterward with all the benefits Foreman already provides. Working title for this is answers2enc.

  An optional expansion would be the other way around. Foreman can contain an environment with puppet modules and parameters. This could be extracted into an installer to deploy a new host or maybe a Docker image. Working title for this is enc2answers.

Domain-less provisioning for VMs

• Status: Not started
• Summary of idea: Users can’t create domains on demand on certain cloud services (AWS, DO, etc). We should fetch existing domains from compute resources, or at least allow creating virtual hosts without one. This would make Foreman more accessible as users don’t necessarily want to deal with interfaces setup. We could even have an ‘advanced’ tick button or something that limits the Host form to the minimal requirements unless the button is checked.
• Knowledge prerequisite: Ruby, some Javascript
• Skill level: Medium
• Contacts: Daniel Lobato Garcia
• Mentor(s): Daniel Lobato Garcia

Project Suggestions

Send a pull request with the content of your proposal to theforeman.org at GitHub. See Dave Neary’s post for suggestions on how to propose ideas.

Ideas should be useful to the community, and should have an estimated time, to help participants choose work that can be completed in the time allotted. Original good ideas will be valued. We don’t want to impose anything. This is Free and Open Source software.

As usual, if you are doubtful about whether your idea is ok or not, feel free to ask in #theforeman-dev.