Introduction

In this blog post, I am going to share my experience on how I made my first contribution to ManageIQ, the upstream open source project for Red Hat CloudForms. The post explains how I encountered and investigated an issue, and finally fixed it thereby sending my first “Pull Request” to ManageIQ repository.

Issue

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.

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.

Introduction

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:

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:

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:

This blog is part 5 of our series on Container Management with CloudForms].

In this last post, we focus on financial management of container environments for both chargeback and for optimizing infrastructure resource usage and spending.

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.

This blog is part 2 of our series on Container Management with CloudForms.

Containers have rapidly evolved from being used for development and testing to production. Today, many vendors provide container products supporting enterprise IT production workloads. Red Hat offers [OpenShift], (https://www.openshift.com) an open source container platform based on Kubernetes.

First let’s talk about Remote Session vs Remote Console, they are often confused.

With this short video, we continue our series based on Red Hat Knowledge Base articles exploring how to take advantage of Ansible Automation inside Red Hat CloudForms. This post is a follow-up of our previous My First Ansible Service article.

This is pretty simple but very useful. I have done a little research and whilst inspect is a way of seeing inside of an object its also hard to read and not very re-usable. Being somewhat old now (crazy thought) XML used to be the way we described things. Yes I know yaml, json etc have come to replace XML in languages such as Ruby, but I cannot get away from XML is far easier to read and self describing than the aforementioned.