Highlighting Popular Use Cases in Foreman Community Demos

Hello Foreman Community,

We’re thrilled to announce an exciting new initiative aimed at enriching our community demos and bringing more value to our users.
As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance the demo sessions, as described in this post, starting this month, we’ll be showcasing popular use cases during our demos to provide you with real-world insights and practical demonstrations.

Why Are We Doing This?

At Foreman, we’re all about empowering our users with the knowledge and tools they need to make the most of our platform. By featuring popular use cases in our demos, we want to give you a deeper understanding of how Foreman can address specific challenges and streamline your workflows.

What to Expect?

Each demo, we’ll focus on different popular use cases that resonate with our community members. Here’s a sneak peek at some of the use cases we’ll be highlighting:

Use Case Presenter Demo
Populating Inventory through Host Registration @lstejska Community Demo #137
Automating common tasks through Remote Execution @aruzicka Community Demo #138
Configuration of Hosts using Ansible Roles @nofaralfasi Community Demo #140
Configuration of Hosts through Puppet Modules @ekohl Community Demo #141
Provisioning Hosts
Configuration Management
Content Management and Lifecycle Environments
Users Management

How Can You Get Involved?

  1. Suggest Topics: We want to hear from you! If there’s a specific use case or topic you’d like us to cover in our demos, please let us know. Your input will help shape our upcoming presentations and ensure they cater to your interests and needs.
  2. Volunteer as a Presenter: Do you possess expertise in a particular use case? We encourage you to volunteer to lead a demo presentation. Sharing your insights and experience with the community can be a rewarding way to contribute.

How Should Each Demo Look Like?

To ensure a consistent and informative experience, we’ve outlined the following guidelines for each demo:

  1. Each demo should take about 5-10 minutes.
  2. At the beginning of each demo, we should specify the prerequisites.
  3. Before showing the demo, we should explain to our users what they will gain from it.

When and Where?

The use cases demos will be presented during our community demos, which are held every three weeks on Thursdays at 14:00 UTC.
You can join the demos on our YouTube channel or watch the recordings later at your convenience.

Who Will Present?

Our use cases demos will be led by experts from our community who have hands-on experience with Foreman and its various use cases.

We’re excited to embark on this journey of showcasing popular use cases and providing you with practical demonstrations that can help you maximize the potential of Foreman. Stay tuned for updates, and mark your calendars for our upcoming demos!

See you there!

2 Likes

I would suggest spliting up provisioning hosts in multiple demos as there are the different operating systems on the one side and different ways of provisioning on the other side. In our training we show the basic PXE installation, expand this with compute resource, use discovery image for metal as a service and boot disk for limited network access and I explain how boot disk can also help with VMware as a special integration. All this would be a long demo, but all this cases are valid for different environments.

Other possible topics for later are:

  • Webconsole (Cockpit-Integration) starting from the REX job to deploy it to what you get
  • Hooks (Webhook & Shellhook) but this would need a good example like Foreman :: Integrating Foreman with Event-Driven Ansible
  • Expire Hosts which would be a short one, but it is quite helpful
  • OpenSCAP perhaps teaming up with someone who can give an advise on good policies and how to adjust provisioning and configuration management for it
  • LEAPP as it may convince someone to do in-place upgrades instead of re-installation
  • Windows deployment because it is special and has some caveats

I can perhaps volunteer for some depending on my time to spare.

3 Likes

Thank you for your valuable suggestions, Dirk!

It’s worth noting that Marek has also put forward some topics for consideration here, and a few of them are already included in our list:

  • adding hosts to the Foreman inventory (registration and other means, perhaps each can be separate)
  • various kinds of provisioning (baremetal, discovery, bootdisks, compute resources, image based provisioning), customizing provisioning templates through parameters and template editor
  • compliance enforcement through openscap integration
  • running custom script/task on hosts
  • tweaking Foreman behavior through settings
  • configuration of hosts through ansible roles
  • configuration of hosts through puppet modules
  • investigating infrastructure through dashboard capabilities
  • managing Foreman templates in external git repository
  • searching through out the inventory
  • mirroring some repository and maintaining a local copy
  • versioning of the content

As we gather more volunteers, I’ll continue to expand the main list with additional topics.

2 Likes

I got a volunteer who would be able to prepare some external authentication show cases :slight_smile:

3 Likes

Throwing in some more REX related things:

  • REX modes - pull & async
  • REX tunables - concurrency control, future and recurring execution, scaling
  • Content management and patching with REX and Katello
3 Likes