Foreman is a lifecycle management tool for hosts, helping from provisioning through to configuration management and monitoring. It's traditionally been associated with Puppet, but now boasts Chef support with fact and report handler integration. In this session, we'll see how Foreman fits into your infrastructure and the provisioning and Chef integration in action.

1. Foreman and Chef integration
Dominic Cleal
dcleal@redhat.com
17th April 2014

2. Foreman + Chef | 2 | Dominic Cleal
Agenda
● An intro to Foreman
● Traditional Foreman <-> CM integration
● Integrated Foreman <-> Chef areas
● Demo
● Quick look behind the scenes
● Where next?

3. Foreman + Chef | 3 | Dominic Cleal
Introduction to Foreman

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Areas of CM integration
● Facts
● Reports
● Class import
● Parameter (value) management
● External node / run list determination

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Traditional Foreman <-> CM

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Integrated Foreman <-> Chef

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Authentication and proxying

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Authentication and proxying

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Demo

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Facts uploads

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Report uploads

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Future possibilities
● Better provisioning support: provide templates,
associate Chef servers with hosts, chef-solo
● Foreman 1.5 adds config groups – are these
analogous to Chef's roles?
● Can we install and configure the handler at
runtime?
● Could some of the Chef server UI be
embedded into Foreman, or vice-versa?

13. Foreman + Chef | 13 | Dominic Cleal
Questions?
● https://github.com/theforeman/foreman_chef
– RPM users: yum install foreman-plugin-chef
– Gem or Debian users: gem install foreman_chef
● https://github.com/theforeman/chef-handler-foreman
– gem install chef-handler-foreman
● Provisioning snippet:
https://gist.github.com/domcleal/11003111
● Office hours at 3:15pm