Foreman is ten years old, and we’re excited to share the highlights of the birthday party we attended, organized by Netways at their office in Nuremberg. A good chunk of the Foreman community was there, enjoying the opportunity to finally meet in person, listen to interesting presentations, and eat delicious cake. Check out what to look forward to next year.
Netways is a company offering support services to companies in need of monitoring and automation for their IT infrastructure and software. They use (and promote) open source solutions, and have been on the market since 1995. They are also very good at organizing birthday events, as they proved by throwing a birthday party for Foreman on the 25th of July.
The day began with a number of Foreman community members gathering at the Netways office. We saw many representatives from Red Hat and ATIX. Most of those in attendance were developers, product managers and consultants, rather than Foreman users. The event was a great opportunity to network, finally meet members of the community in person, and check out the two demo stations.
Then there was cake. Ohad, Foreman’s founder, asked the community to assist him in blowing the candles, because he feels they are as responsible as he is for Foreman’s success. Post cake-break, we settled down for presentations about Foreman’s history and future. We also held organized discussions on topics like Foreman documentation and enjoyed several technical presentations. Here are some choice points from the event’s agenda:
- A community talk led by Rahul Bajaj, Ori Rabin and Greg Sutcliffe from Red Hat,
- “The State of Debian Support” by Quirin Pamp from ATIX,
- A meeting with the Satellite Product Managers, with time for a discussion, led by Dana Singleterry and Rich Jerrido from Red Hat,
- A case study involving Puppet and Foreman by Lennart Betz from Netways,
- “Writing Ansible modules for Foreman and Katello” by Evgeni Golov from Red Hat,
- The social aspect of being part of the Foreman community, discussed by Ewoud Kohl van Wijngaarden from Red Hat.
Greg, one of the Community Managers who had recently stepped down, received a farewell gift - a t-shirt signed by almost everyone in the community. He also delivered a presentation, using simulations to show Foreman’s growth over the years. If it sounds like the Foreman community is extremely supportive and friendly, that’s because it is. The work is kept transparent, and everyone maintains a collaborative approach, jumping in to build on each other’s ideas. In our experience, everyone working on Foreman is very growth-oriented and happy to share the results of their work.
In the future, we hope to further collaborate with the Foreman community and Netways. Foreman is a great tool that can be extremely useful when applied skillfully. Together with a representative of our client, dm-drogerie markt, we’ve narrowed down what we’ve done so far regarding custom Foreman development:
- We built a template rendering engine and a GraphQL API (now part of Foreman’s codebase),
- We implemented the Foreman Git Templates and Foreman Vault plugins (open source on GitHub),
- We designed and implemented customized Foreman web interfaces for a client.
We’ve been working on Foreman since 2018, and it was a treat to finally meet meet many of our collaborators face-to-face, in a friendly atmosphere and with enough time for a good chat. We can’t wait for a repeat experience next year!
We’re happy to help companies looking for Foreman developers, or interested in customizing Foreman for a specific purpose. As active members of the community, we have the knowledge and skill to help.
