Blog Posts for 2017

January

Last Two Weeks in ManageIQ: A brand new Euwe

As the end of 2016 grew closer, and the Winter Solstice brought with it either the longest night or shortest night, depending on which hemisphere you frequent, ManageIQ cut its latest release Euwe. You can download it here or clone it from Github here Happy New Year!

Schedule change: 3-week Sprints to 2-week Sprints

Happy New Year! We’re starting off 2017 with a notable change in the ManageIQ process. In an effort to become more agile, and allow more flexibility in planning and scheduling, we will be switching from 3-week Sprints to 2-week Sprints.

Sprint 51 review - January 4, 2017

Welcome to the first sprint review of 2017! It was a relatively succinct meeting, so I’ll try to keep this short and sweet. First, a couple of news items in case you missed them:

ManageIQ Year In Review 2016

Last year has been pretty exciting and eventful for ManageIQ! If you’re new to the community, or if you just want a refresher, let me be your guide and summarize the cool progress we made throughout 2016.

February

Sprint 53 review - February 1, 2017

As we move on to our second 2-week Sprint, we find 146 pull requests merged in the main ManageIQ repo, with enhancements and bugs taking up 2/3 of the pie. Further breakdown shows 39 PRs in the providers category, 21 in API, 20 in core and 12 in UI, and we expect the number of remaining UI PRs to go down to zero with the recent repo split. Across all the repos, which includes 77 repos under the ManageIQ umbrella, and 14 manageiq-* ones, there were 432 pull requests in total.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Love is in the PRs

Happy Valentine’s Day! Jillian here to walk you through the love given to PRs this past week. In the spirit of the holiday, and before you devour lots of :chocolate_bar:, let’s take a look at those PRs with :heart:!

Integrating CloudForms and ServiceNow- An Introduction

I was presenting the CloudForms service catalog and self service capabilities to a customer, when the head of operations says: “This looks great, but there is no way we are going to use this. The tool we use for everything from service desk to request tracking to service management is ServiceNow. Can you integrate your service catalog into ServiceNow?”

Sprint 54 review - February 15, 2017

Welcome to the Sprint 54 review recap! For this sprint, we had 126 pull requests in the main ManageIQ repo, with a good mix of enhancements, bugs, cleanup and more. The Classic UI repo contributed 80 more PRs, with Integration tests following closely at 77 PRs. Grand total across all repos is 462. As we keep splitting out repos from the monolith (which is looking less like one every sprint), the majority of the work will be going outside of the main repo.

March

Sprint 55 review - March 1, 2017

Welcome once again to a sprint review recap. This time we are looking at Sprint 55, which produced a total of 495 pull requests across all the ManageIQ repos. :fist::fist: We used to see similar numbers in 3-week sprints last year! Even though we haven’t done an official comparison, PR counts seem to be drifting up in many repos, including the main repo (with 144 PRs this sprint) which has been split into many parts. With 2 more new repos (font-fabulous and manageiq-api-mock) this sprint, it seems that while the repo-splits caused some initial disruption, the outcome allowed for more velocity per repository.

Announcing Euwe-2

We’ve just built Euwe-2. This release contains a security fix, bug fixes, numerous UI tweaks, and stabilization.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Deletions and Dragons

The Players

Jamlamin Tarmikos: Male Human Dwarven Defender Str 12 Int 15 Wis 18 Dex 12 Con 16 Cha 17
Thernda Strifelaugher: Female Halfling Dwarven Defender Str 15 Int 15 Wis 13 Dex 13 Con 6 Cha 11
Janmorel: Male Half-Orc Loremaster Str 7 Int 15 Wis 12 Dex 7 Con 3 Cha 12
Nerisstina Cupshigh: Female Gnome Paladin Str 14 Int 15 Wis 10 Dex 8 Con 13 Cha 9
Krisnys Bearcharger: Female Elf Shadowdancer Str 4 Int 15 Wis 8 Dex 10 Con 5 Cha 19
Eillyassa Chorster: Female Gnome Ranger Str 15 Int 15 Wis 3 Dex 3 Con 13 Cha 3
Jannys Falconsflight: Female Half-Orc Paladin Str 6 Int 15 Wis 5 Dex 7 Con 11 Cha 4
Janella Silentall: Female Half-Orc Dwarven Defender Str 11 Int 15 Wis 8 Dex 18 Con 11 Cha 13
Magnys Gladomain: Female Elf Rogue Str 10 Int 15 Wis 13 Dex 10 Con 9 Cha 15

Sprint 56 review - March 15, 2017

Greetings from FOSSASIA 2017 in Singapore! It’s exciting to see the growth of the open source movement in Asia and I hope to share more about ManageIQ with everyone I meet here. However, since I’m bustling about at this activity-filled event, I’ll have to make this post shorter than usual.

Event Report - PyCon Pune 2017

Hi, I am Satyajit from the ManageIQ Quality Engineering team. I will be your guide in this quick recap of what happened in the PyCon Pune-2017 Python Conference.

Sprint 57 review - March 29, 2017

Welcome to Sprint 57 recap. In this sprint we merged a total of 565 pull request combined, almost 10% more than last sprint’s 518, and well ahead of what we used to achieve with 3-week sprints in 2016! The 180 PRs in the main repo is distributed in thirds between enhancements, bugs, and everything else. We are also growing in number of repos, from 103 repos 5 sprints ago, to 108 now. The new repos introduced this sprint are amazon_ssa_support and manageiq-ui-scaffold. More info on them will come as they get populated.

April

Announcing Euwe-2.1

We’ve just built Euwe-2.1. This release resolves the issue in Euwe-2, where dropdowns and trees don’t work in the UI. If you already have Euwe-2 installed, you can follow the steps here for the manual fix.

Blood, fire and ManageIQ

In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. Same as this Last week in ManageIQ post. My name is Robin, from the UI team. If you are reading this, I hope you are very enthusiastic and have very poor English grammar skill.

Posting CloudForms Notifications to Slack

Keeping the whole IT team informed about events or actions in your IT infrastructure can be challenging. Many IT teams have turned to team messaging applications, like Slack, to improve internal team communications. CloudForms, with its flexible integration capabilities, can be connected to Slack to notify the team whenever important events happen.

Name of G Release

The results of the poll on the name of the G release are in. Nona Gaprindashvili is the winner! Looking forward to all the exciting features that will come in the Gaprindashvili release! Thanks to all that voted!! We had 104 total votes for the G-Release,…whereas, the F-Release garnered a total of 98 votes. The ManageIQ Community continues to grow!

Announcing Euwe-3

We’ve just built Euwe-3. This release contains a security fix, bug fixes, numerous UI tweaks, and stabilization. You can download the Euwe-3 release here

Last Week in ManageIQ: And Finally...Fine-tuning Fine

After a long and cold winter, we are thankful that spring is finally here! In some parts of the world, the cherry blossoms are spectacular. The birds are happily chirping. A Fine season (get it?) indeed is one that brings with it a glimmer of sunshine and all around goodness.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Squashing Bugz

Hello there! This is Harpreet Kataria, my first contribution at LWIMIQ blog post, I want to share some updates on what has been happening in ManageIQ world this past week. Team ManageIQ has been busy squashing bugz rapidly to make Fine release finer and more stable. After all bugz are bugz and must be squashed.

May

Announcing Fine Beta 2 Release

On behalf of the ManageIQ team, we’re pleased to announce the Beta 2 release for ManageIQ Fine! You can download the Fine Beta 2 Release here.

Deploying CloudForms at Scale

One of the challenges of deploying CloudForms to manage a large environment is knowing how to tune it – what knobs to turn and dials to watch for.

Sprint 60 review - May 10, 2017

Sprint 60 is mostly focused on the stabilization of upcoming Fine release, with close to half of the total 570 pull requests (a new high) going towards bug fixes. This sprint marks the first time that the Classic UI repo has outpaced the core ManageIQ repo in PRs, 158 to 148. From Sprint 52 to 60, the number of ManageIQ repositories went from 103 to 114 (11 new repos over 8 sprints), and more are being planned. We have a new “Repository Health Report” which includes number of files, Code Climate GPA scores and issues, as well as test coverages across different repos.

Last Week in ManageIQ: A Flurry of Activity

:wave: Hello out there, ManageIQ community! Welcome to another edition of Last Week in ManageIQ hosted by yours truly, :woman_technologist: Jillian . As summer approaches it may be getting warm outside, but the ManageIQ repositories are still flurrying :snowflake: with activity as usual.

June

Announcing Fine-2

We’ve just built Fine-2. This release contains bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization.

July

Last Week in ManageIQ: Kicking off the summer edition

Chris here, welcoming you to the first of the biweekly summer edition of Last Week in ManageIQ! Though, the summer solstice (for the northern hemisphere) already occurred on June 20th. And wait, that’s not even the start of meteorological summer which was actually on June 1st. Also shouldn’t it be Last Weeks In ManageIQ, then?

August

Announcing Fine-3

We’ve just built Fine-3. This release contains security fixes, bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Back to Basics

Hello there! It’s Jillian again, here with the latest happenings the last two weeks in ManageIQ. I probably cannot top last week’s edition, so I’ve decided to bring it back to basics for this one. Read on to see what’s been happening in our world over the past two weeks.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Where Have All The Cow Wranglers Gone

Hi Friends! Allen here, with news to share! Since we last talked much has happened, two weeks of on goings are due for discussion. A few quick stats before we dig in:

  • No new repositories this time around!
  • ~ 447 PRs closed across 133 ManageIQ Repos (between 08/07 to 08/21)
  • In descending order, the top four repositories by pull request activity:
  • Downstream version updated from 4.5 to 4.6 here

September

Last Week in ManageIQ: All Hands Busy

Last week, most engineering hands were busy in an internal Engineering All-Hands meeting. A few stray hands still found the opportunity to submit some PRs, but there were no available fingers for typing up an entry for “Last week in ManageIQ”. So please allow me, Carol, to paw in a few words in this edition.

October

H-release Rearchitecture

The ManageIQ team underwent a rearchitecture investigation during the summer of 2017. In this blog post I’m hoping to give a bit of an overview of why we did this, and some of the preliminary results. We did a lot of research, and there’s no way I can fit all of it in a single blog post, so this is just the first in a series on the rearchitecture efforts.

Container Management with CloudForms – Service Health

This blog is part 3 of our series on Container Management with CloudForms.

A second area of concern identified when managing a containerized environment is service health. We need to operate our containers with good performance, reliability, and ensure high enough utilization ratios. In this post, we focus on the container based infrastructure, its on-going resource consumption, and how we can monitor and optimize its health.

Using Tags for Access Control

Most systems use Access Control Lists (ACL’s) to manage user’s access to objects. Common examples are ACL’s for file systems, LDAP, Web Servers and many more. Anyone who has had to create ACL rules and maintain them knows how complicated this can be. To make access control easy again, CloudForms uses tags. If the group a user belongs to has the same tag as the accessed object, access is granted, if not, access is denied.

Container Management with CloudForms – Security & Compliance

This blog is part 4 of our series on Container Management with CloudForms.

This blog post focuses on the security and compliance aspects of managing containerized environments. In a container based infrastructure, the container software is often built directly by developers, usually via continuous integration (CI/CD). Once it comes to deploying this software in production, we need to make sure it is securely validated.

Another challenge is the source of those containers. Developers can use any base images for their builds, including insecure container images downloaded from the Internet. On the other hand, Enterprise IT needs to ensure all containers running in production are built based on trusted and approved sources.

And finally, it is also important to validate that all containers images, as well as containers instantiated from those images, are up to date with respect to security fixes.

CloudForms provides specific capabilities for managing security and compliance for container based infrastructures.

It can enforce policies for container hosts, and marks the nodes that are not compliant (e.g. outdated versions, configuration issues, security risks, etc). Those policies take into account information about the container host itself, but also about any resources that are connected to this host. If needed, it can trigger an action to start automatic remediation. We could for example automatically trigger an update of a package when a new security fix is available.

CloudForms also provides reporting for container sources. For example, it can identify containers that come from untrusted registries.

Finally it can scan the content of container images using OpenSCAP for standardized security checks. When an image is identified as non-compliant, all running containers instantiated from this image can be flagged automatically.

The following video demonstration highlights these capabilities in CloudForms:

Hawkular Alerts in ManageIQ

Note: Hawkular was deprecated as of December 18th, 2017. New releases of ManageIQ won’t include support for Hawkular as a Middleware Provider.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Survey Says

Hi all,…John Prause here. Last Week in ManageIQ, we reviewed the responses provided by our community users to a survey with five questions. The questions were as follows:

  • How satisfied are you with the look and feel of the ManageIQ user interface?
  • What are the challenges you face when getting started with ManageIQ?
  • Do you attend the ManageIQ Sprint Reviews held every two weeks?
  • Do you know how to contribute to the ManageIQ open source project?
  • Is there anything else you’d like to share about ManageIQ?

API Contributor's Guide

The API has been growing quickly thanks to our many contributors. In an effort to help new contributors get up to speed quickly, it was about time for a blog post to explain the process of adding in a new collection and subcollection, as well as provide some examples for commonly asked questions.

Announcing Fine-4

We’ve just built Fine-4. This release contains bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization.

Best Practice Recommendations for Automate

Few days ago one of our fellows, Christian Jung, published a very good article explaining best practices while coding Ruby code inside Red Hat CloudForms. The post does not claim to be exhaustive, but establishes guidelines about coding, naming conventions and rules to follow in order to make the code cleaner, easier to understand, and more consumable by others.

In the article, several key topics are discussed, such as:

November

CloudForms Service Bundle Creation using VM Provisioning and Ansible Tower Automation Job

Service catalog bundles are a really useful CloudForms feature that enable us to mix and match various existing service catalog items together to form bundles of tasks.

One of the more useful examples of a bundle is to create a new VM, and then run an Ansible Tower job template on the resulting VM to configure it with an application role. If we have an Ansible Tower server added to our CloudForms installation as an automation provider, this is quite simple. We described the procedure to configure an Ansible Tower provider in CloudForms as part of our previous series on Ansible Tower integration in CloudForms 4.1.

In this example we’ll combine two existing service catalog items. The first creates a new CentOS 7 virtual machine in a Red Hat Virtualization provider, and the second installs a simple LAMP stack using a job template defined in an Ansible Tower server, attached to CloudForms as an automation provider.

Each standalone catalog item has its own service dialog. The dialog for the VM provision service simply prompts for the service name and VM name, as follows:

if on a Jersey night

You are about to read d-m-u’s latest blog post. So it goes. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Center yourself. It’s a difficult task, as you know. We got a bunch of robot computer people sittin’ around with their faces stuffed in computer screens. Breathe. Ignore all the robot computer people commotion around you.

Build your Software Defined Data Center with Red Hat CloudForms and OpenStack

A few days ago, Michele Naldini posted a series on the [Red Hat Developer Blog] [https://developers.redhat.com] about how to build a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) using Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Red Hat CloudForms allows to more quickly deploy and scale Red Hat OpenStack Platform (also known as OSP) private clouds, combine existing IT infrastructure investments, and federate public cloud deployments. This series includes both background information and hands-on tips to implement a full SDDC in practice.
The first part of the series covers the introduction, the goals, some key information about OSP and more specifically Heat, OSP configuration, and pre-requisites. It also illustrates how to start working with OSP in order to spin a new operating service based on a 3 tier deployment (2 web servers, 2 app servers, and 1 database) using 2 load balancers (1 for the web servers and 1 for the app servers).
The second part focuses on CloudForms, where it shows how to create a service based on Heat templates, using service dialog, and how to restrict services to a set of users. Both Operator UI and the Self-Service UI are used in the exercise. The blog series also contains a summary video that covers all steps explained as part of the deployment. Read more on the Red Hat Developer Blog:

Name of H Release

The results of the poll on the name of the H release are in. Jon Ludvig Hammer is the winner! Looking forward to all the striking features that will come in the Hammer release :hammer: :hammer: Thanks to all that voted - we had 97 total votes for the H-Release.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Because you know I'm all about the bugs

It’s that time of year again what with; Thanksgiving, Black Friday deals, and many other seasonal holidays around the corner. On everyone’s mind though before we get to all that are… …bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Well more specifically bug fixes. With the Gaprindashvili release just around the corner, the team is busy busy, fixing bugs and making the bestest release of ManageIQ yet.

Implementing Continuous Integration for CloudForms using Git and Travis

Christian Jung recently posted another interesting article as a follow-up on Best Practice Recommendations for Automate. This time, he focuses on setting up Continuous Integration for Red Hat CloudForms.

In his blog post, Christian discusses how to use common development tools like GIT and Travis in conjunction with CloudForms to configure a datastore pointing to a git repository and set a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) environment. This feature is available in CloudForms since CloudForms 4.2.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Bugs In Fix Out

Hello there! This week’s LWIMIQ is contributed by Harpreet Hope everyone in the US had a wonderful time enjoying Thanksgiving feast with family and friends, and of course shopping Black Friday deals. With Christmas and New Year right around the corner everyone must be in holiday mode, while our team at ManageIQ is working hard to get Gaprindashvili as stable as possible. Since we are in a bug fixing phase not much to report features/enhancement wise from my side.

Multi-tier Application Deployment using Ansible and CloudForms (Video)

This article is a follow up on our previous blog post VMware provisioning example] using Ansible, where we deployed a simple virtual machine on VMware using Ansible from the CloudForms service catalog. In this week’s demonstration, we go a step further and provision a multi-tier application on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once provisioned, the application lifecycle, as well as all day 2 operations are performed from Red Hat CloudForms.

December

Last week in ManageIQ - Fixing bugs

Hi. I, ZitaNemeckova will tell you more about our effort to improve our codebase. It’s not only about fixing code but also about cleaning and deleting. If you never used static analysis tool to find dead methods this post is for you.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Wrapping up Bugs

Welcome to this week’s edition of LWIMIQ! It’s beginning to look a lot like the holiday season, and we sure have been as busy as :santa:’s elves with wrapping :gift: up bugs.