Apologies for the lack of a January newsletter - the conferences in Czechia and Belgium kept us all very busy! Here’s the roundup of the last few months in the Foreman world.
Foreman 1.14 released
Foreman 1.14.0 (and bugfix 1.14.1) are now available, containing new support for automatic IPv6 addressing, LDAP and template enhancements, and a new email delivery configuration UI. For demonstrations of the new highlights in action, you can see the 30s clips on our YouTube playlist.
Thanks to the 90+ contributors to the release itself, as well as the many, many people who test the release candidates and report back. We couldn’t do it without you!
Katello 3.3 released
Hot off the code forges, Katello 3.3 was released yesterday! Containing updates to manifest handling, authorized repositories, package applicability, content view enhancements and Tracer support, it’s a big update. See the release thread for details - and do watch out for the Puppet 3 -> Puppet 4 upgrade bug (which is scheduled to be fixed in 3.3.1)
European Conference Extravaganza
As always in late January & early February, we have 2 weeks of conference madness. With that behind us now, here’s a round up of what happened at them.
DevConf.cz 2017
Kicking off with DevConf.cz in Brno, the Foreman team were present in force, with a booth and brand new full demo based on Intel NUC nodes (many thanks to Tomas for his work on the demo). This got a lot of attention, and the booth was consistently busy on both Friday and Saturday.
I ran a Foreman Workshop on Friday afternoon, with the intention of getting users set up with a libvirt-based sandbox environment - complete with working Puppet, PXE provisioning, and Libvirt integration in Foreman. This went reasonably well, although the DevConf wifi meant that we were reduced to passing around QCOW images via USB. Lesson learned for next time! Still, some people left the room with working installs so I consider it a success.
There were also talks from Ivan on Ansible, Lukas on bare metal image deployment, and a Pulp talk from Michael Hrivnak. Thanks all!
FOSDEM 2017
I view FOSDEM as the warm up for CfgMgmtCamp (which we’ll get to in a moment) and again I spent the whole time on the booth (apart from my own talks). As with previous years we shared with the awesome oVirt team, and the booth was consistent packed for the whole 2 days. Again, the demo was a bit hit (and thanks to Sean O’Keeffe for supplying a monitor for it!). The booth looked a bit like this:
This year, for the first time, I felt like the split in “people who know / use Foreman” and “people who have never seen Foreman” was very close to 50/50. In previous years, the “new users” group was much larger, so this is a welcome feeling. Whether that’s due to the project growing in size & reach, or due to the same people coming to FOSDEM every year, is unclear :)
There were several talks on Foreman - I previewed a plugin I’m (slowly) working on for showing Puppet catalog diffs in the UI, and Ondrej Prazak did a well received talk on OpenSCAP in the Security track, as well as some less-Foreman-specific talks in the Community Track. You can catch the videos/slides here:
- Puppet Catalog Diffs (Greg Sutcliffe) - MP4
- OpenSCAP and Foreman (Ondrej Prazak) - (not recorded - slides)
- Closing Loops (Greg Sutcliffe) - on discussions in open source communities - MP4
- How to Get Your Issues Fixed (Tomer Brisker) - (not recorded - slides)
CfgMgmtCamp 2017
The main event! As usual we had own own track in Gent, and again the quality of the talks was superb. Sadly, I couldn’t get the talks recorded (something I’d to see next year, for sure) - but I do plan to ask the presenters to do their talks for our YouTube channel, so hopefully you’ll get to see them soon. If you have any you’d like to see sooner rather than later, check out the schedule and let me know which you want to see.
We also had the booth here too, and again it was busy whenever I was there (although I mostly was running our track). Swag ran out almost immediately, surpassing even my high expectations of what we could shift. More t-shirts next year I guess :)
Finally, we had the usual Foreman Community dinner in Gent this year, and we packed out Du Progres restaurant with 25 or so people for a great night of chat and post-conference relaxing. Thanks to all who came - see you again next year!
Foreman Construction Day 2017
After the success of last year, we ran another hackday after the main conference. This year saw similar numbers (~25 people), but this year we added in some presentations as a “main track” on how to get into some of the newer areas of the codebase (e.g. React in the UI), along with two breakout rooms where I saw hacking on new OS support, image deployment, custom plugins, Ansible integration, and more. Dirk Goetz kindly also lead a new-user training session, which I hope we can do again.
Thanks to all who came and made it a successful event!
Upcoming Events
- Foreman Deep Dives: Flux + Redux overview - 3pm Wed 1st March
In this Deep Dive Matan Werbner will be joining us for another session on UI technologies. Redux is an opinionated state container library, that is built on the foundations of functional programming. It allows our UI to be predictable, maintainable and highly testable. If you are interested in making your code more readable and maintainable, and to have an opinionated, well defined, data flow, join us! This talk requires no previous knowledge of redux, react, or anything except basic JS chops (ES6). We will go over the motivation, and the concepts behind flux, and later dive in to real-world implementation using Redux in our foreman app!
Community Demos
The community demo series showcases all that’s happening in the Foreman community. In recent demos we’ve looked at new UI features for 1.15 (notifications), changes in Katello and it’s UI, many plugin updates (e.g. Ansible, Templates, Docker, OpenSCAP, and the new Omaha plugin), API changes, and dev tools such as Forklift. Check them out!
(All Foreman events are now available via the Foreman Calendar)
Updated plugins
Updated plugins:
- foreman_ansible updated to 1.4.4
- foreman_chef updated to 0.5.0
- foreman_discovery updated to 8.0.0
- foreman_expire_hosts updated to 2.2.0
- foreman_hooks updated to 0.3.13
- foreman_memcache updated to 0.0.6
- foreman_openscap updated to 0.6.4
- foreman_templates updated to 4.0.1
- foreman_xen updated to 0.4.1
- puppetdb_foreman updated to 2.0
- smart_proxy_dns_route53 updated to 3.0.1
Acknowledgements
Thanks to everyone who contributes to the Foreman community - patches, plugins, testing, bug reports, translations, interviews, presentations, meet ups and everything else. Your efforts are very much appreciated!