Foreman Birthday Event 2025

Events
1

Hello Community,

I want to announce the next occurrence of the annual Foreman Birthday Event. NETWAYS will be hosting again, as always supported by ATIX and the Foreman Project. We want to have an in-person event again in Nuremberg in our famous event room, similar to what ATIX did last year.

We plan again to have 5-6 talks about a half hour length, followed by some social gathering. So if you are interested in giving a talk, please send an email. We want to have talks for the whole community, so it has to be related to Foreman of course, but we will happily accept all different kind of talks. Be it a new plugin or some new tricks for an old one, a case study showing your environment, about Foreman itself, Katello/Satellite/Orcharhino, Pulp, Candlepin or even Puppet/OpenVox and Ansible or the Community itself. Everything will be considered.

For planning purpose we will have also some registration, but we did not set up this yet. On the one side simply because I did not find the time for it, on the other side because we want to have your feedback on two topics before we finalize our plan for the day.

First one is that we want to attract more people, especially those new to Foreman. In the past we had some demos to play with and ask the experienced user, what gave us also time for some open-space discussions for the developers. We could create something similar, organize a workshop or do something completely different if you have a great idea let us know. What do you think? Do you have some interest in this?

Second one is we are discussing if going hybrid will help the event or make less people attend in person. So a hybrid event or at least recording of the talks would be an option for us. I can not promise anything, but I would like to hear your interest so we can decide based on the Community as the event is for you!

So save the date and spread the word! I will update the thread with news when our plans move forward.

The planned schedule

Time Talk
13:00-13:10 Welcome
13:10-13:50 Containerizing Foreman and friends
13:50-14:30 Foreman Documentation: Year in Review & We Want Your Input!
14:30-15:10 Foreman Resource Quota plugin
15:10-15:30 Cake Break
15:30-16:10 Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to OpenVox and Foreman
16:10-16:50 Katello: Introducing Rolling Content Views
16:50-17:30 A new environment in 4 days?
Afterwards Pizza & Beer

Update May 27: We are going hybrid and registration for following the stream and on-site is open at Foreman Birthday Event / VoxConf 2025

Update June 5: First talk announced Foreman Documentation: Year in Review & We Want Your Input!

Update June 16: Talk announced Katello: Introducing Rolling Content Views

Update June 18: Talk announced Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to OpenVox and Foreman

Update June 23: Waiting list for on-site established

Update July 3: Talk announced A new environment in 4 days?, time table added

Update July 7: Talk announced Containerizing Foreman and friends

14 Likes
2

I do not yet know whether we will have the budget to attend (or whether flying from the USA will even be safe!) so personally, I’d love a hybrid speaking option.

2 Likes
3

Thanks for organizing this! I think the hybrid event would be great, especially if new people should be attracted.

2 Likes
4

Today I can announce we will go hybrid. Colleagues tests last week were successful, so we will stream the event on the Foreman’s youtube channel for those who can not attend, but still want to join live and get at least involved via the youtube chat. Afterwards the video will be cut and uploaded, so they are available to everyone.

We will open the registration not far in the future, but this needs some small finishing touches as we are preparing for another exciting announcement. So stay tuned!

Currently we are still searching speakers so if you have something to talk about get in touch with us!

3 Likes
5

Two updates on the same day, I know you will think I am insane! :wink:

But as promised I have now a link for the registration: Foreman Birthday Event / VoxConf 2025

This is needed for our planning so we can provide everyone with food if you can come to our location and for online we want to avoid random people disturbing the stream, but don’t worry we don’t want to prevent the typically weirdness of this community like we had with the online events during the pandemic. :smiley:

So if you directly clicked on the registration you may have spoiled you on the exiting news I have. We have a second event for you, on the same day in the morning we will have VoxConf. But just let them speak for themselves:

VoxConf is happening! After the big license change from
Perforce in the end of 2024, the community took the next step and now
not only maintains the big chunks of the puppet tooling ecosystem, but
also open source versions of puppet itself! Join our first conference to
learn how we did this, how big companies migrate from Puppet Enterprise
to our packages, OpenVox, and get insights into our plans for the future!

If you want to get more details, they have there own Event page for it! And of course they also look still for speakers!

And if you think now how you should be in Nuremberg so early the day, we can not cover your stay, but if you arrive the day before Vox populi will sponsor a get-together in the evening of the 16th of July and happily welcome also the Foreman Community. Just let us know in the registration if you want to take part.

I hope you are as excited as all who were involved in making this possible!

7 Likes
6

Vox Pupuli person here, looking forward to see you all in NĂĽrnberg!

7

Let me announce the first talk:

Foreman Documentation: Year in Review & We Want Your Input!

Aneta (Red Hat) and Maximilian (ATIX) from the Foreman documentation team
will provide a summary of the current state of the Foreman project’s
documentation. They will share success stories from the past year and
highlight ongoing projects that you could help shape with your input. The
best documentation is built together so come prepared with your questions,
ideas, and feedback!

Thank you, @aneta-petrova and @maximilian! I am looking forward to this follow up of last year’s talk and I hope you all do, too. It is also your chance to help the documentation team to move forward and improve the documentation!

And you can also follow their example and send us a proposal for a talk! :wink:

2 Likes
8

And I can announce another talk:

Katello: Introducing Rolling Content Views

The talk will introduce this new Katello feature, as well as how it was developed.
Starting with a clear user need, through early community discussions and an iterative implementation, encompassing documentation, and testing, there was constant collaboration both across multiple contributors and with community maintainers.
A prime example of how we imagine development in general, and open source community driven development in particular to work.

Some relevant links:

Thank you, @quba42 and @MSinghal for not only suggesting the talk, but also for adding this feature to Katello!

And we are still taking more suggestions if you also want to give a talk at the event!

3 Likes
9

Would be glad if there is a hybrid version. for those who are outside an can’ta afford to travel and join. to be able to watch an be part.

10

Decision for going hybrid was already made, so follow the registration link to get the link for the stream. And I will try to update the first post to include all the information.

1 Like
11

And another talk:

Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to OpenVox and Foreman

The changes to the license and EULA that came by Perforce led to a lot of companies looking for alternatives to Puppet Enterprise. In this talk I provide insights in what PE actually is, how people can migrate and how Foreman can benefit from it.

Thank you, @bastelfreak for covering this topic in a talk at the Foreman Birthday Event where both communities and there interests will meet.

4 Likes
12

I am a bit proud and a bit sad, but we had to enable a waiting list for on-site tickets. We decided to limit it for now to 35, so it will not get crowded in our room. Additional registrations will go to the waiting list so we can decide if we want to go up to 50 what would be maximum allowed capacity.

13

And talk number 4:

Foreman Resource Quota plugin

When several users utilize a shared infrastructure, there’s a risk that
some may overconsume resources. Resource quotas help administrators
address this issue by restricting access to shared resources.

The Foreman Resource Quota plugin adds these resource management
features to Foreman. In this presentation, we will outline the main
features of the plugin and recent improvements.

Thank you @nadjaheitmann for this talk and the plugin itself!

2 Likes
14

I am waiting for one last to talk to be confirmed to finalize the schedule, so here you have the current time table which I added also to the initial post.

The planned schedule:

Time Talk
13:00-13:10 Welcome
13:10-13:50
13:50-14:30 Foreman Documentation: Year in Review & We Want Your Input!
14:30-15:10 Katello: Introducing Rolling Content Views
15:10-15:30 Cake Break
15:30-16:10 Migrating from Puppet Enterprise to OpenVox and Foreman
16:10-16:50 Foreman Resource Quota plugin
16:50-17:30 A new environment in 4 days?
Afterwards Pizza & Beer

If you did not look into yet, the schedule for VoxConf is also available.

And so I can announce that I will also give a talk:

A new environment in 4 days?

I read or hear quite often Foreman is too complicated or its options are just overwhelming be it community, customer or even colleagues. And while I have to agree that you have to learn Foreman / Katello and need a good understanding of services like DNS, DHCP, configuration management and many others to get the full experience, I am still impressed what you can achieve with it even after using it over 10 years now.

This talk is a customer story where I had the opportunity to start fresh. A new data center has to be provisioned, only some systems are prepared and in the end requirements from NIS 2 have to be met. My task to setup Foreman as a Proof of Concept in 4 days. So let’s see how far I came!

2 Likes
15

And last but not least, to complete the program:

Containerizing Foreman and friends

It’s 2025 and we still don’t have a containerized deployment model. But
there is an effort to get this done. Back in December 2024 an RFC was
submitted, Evgeni presented at cfgmgmtcamp and Eric gave a community
demo.

This talk will look at where we are, where we want to get to and how
we’re planning to get there.

Thank you @ekohl for giving us this update!

1 Like
17

Sorry to the OpenVox people waiting for the stream. Recording is working, but stream is not online as we need someone of the channel owners to confirm on youtube. So if someone else reads this who can click the button, please do so!

1 Like
18

Just want to say thank you. The event was a blast and I got so many good feedback. I already made sure to forward it to my colleagues involved, but I must say also thanks here to the rest involved in not just keeping the event alive but making it as great as it was who are ATIX, betadots and many others from the Foreman Project (to not name everyone individually), all the speakers and also all who attended!

I will keep you posted when/if I managed to get a blog post with all my impression up or if someone else comes up with one, and also when the cut videos are available for easier (re-)watching!

6 Likes
19

Thanks everyone for making this hybrid event! I know it was an extra effort that I want to appreicate. I enjoyed watching the stream and the recording later, great job organizers and thanks to all presenters too!

4 Likes
20

Thanks @Dirk and Netways for hosting, it was a pleasure being there!

3 Likes