Welcome to a new year, already with lots of exciting developments.
Foreman 1.4.0 about to be released
We’re very close to announcing the general availability of Foreman 1.4.0, with contributions from over eighty individuals, and
At the time of writing, 1.4.0-RC2 is available for download and is stable, with just one or two known bugs to be fixed in 1.4.0 final. The final release should be available on Thursday 30th January.
Key new features are compute profiles, image user-data (cloud-init) support, web UI enhancements, Kerberos support, a new plugin registration and extension framework, plus lots of new provider support in the smart proxy.
Lots more information is available in the Foreman 1.4 release notes. Keep an eye on the website or the foreman-announce list for the final availability.
Upcoming events
This weekend and coming week, the largest ever group of Foreman users and developers will congregate in Brussels, Belgium for the FOSDEM and CfgMgmtCamp events.
Just before FOSDEM will be a CentOS Dojo event in Brussels, at which Julien Pivotto will give a talk on Lifecycle Management with Foreman.
Moving on to FOSDEM, there will be some Foreman-related talks:
- Config management: Foreman integration with Chef and others, Marek Hulán
- Virtualisation and IaaS: Foreman Project, Ohad Levy
- Testing and automation: Automation in the Foreman infrastructure, Greg Sutcliffe
On Sunday evening, if you’re still in the Brussels area, please join us for a meal. Reply to the Google+ event for numbers.
At CfgMgmtCamp, we’ll hold a dedicated Foreman track with a variety of talks. The complete schedule has fifteen talks on a variety of Foreman-related subjects, including:
- Deploying Foreman in enterprise environments, Nils Domrose
- Realtime remote management with MCollective and Foreman, Sam Kottler
- Hammer - a CLI tool for Foreman, Tomas Strachota
- Managing Foreman with Foreman, Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden
Lastly, at AsiaBSDCon 2014 in early march, Martin Matuška will give a talk on Foreman and FreeBSD provisioning.
Katello installer: alpha testing
The team behind Katello is making good progress in adapting it to be a Foreman plugin, with a new combined installer.
If you’re interested in trying it out in the early stages and report bugs, read Eric’s e-mail to foreman-dev for more details.
Further watching
The last development sprint was completed at the beginning of December, and the sprint demo shows lots of features that are either available in nightly or upcoming work.
This includes user data support, an update on the permissions system changes, compute profiles, dynamic API bindings and Puppet future parser support.
The team regularly holds “deep dive” sessions to explore a new feature or topic. Join the Foreman Google+ community to keep up with these events. Here are the recent recordings:
- Organization and location inheritance: Joseph shows a change to allow a parent/child organization/location concept
- Dynflow tools and concepts (1/2), Dynflow executors (2/2): Petr’s two part deep dive on Dynflow for task orchestration