Hi everyone,
I've been a Puppet user since way back in the 2.x branch, and using Foreman
for a year or two now. I am working on a project and I'm trying to leverage
Foreman as a big part of the automation tier, so I am building a proof of
concept to see if what I am trying to do can be done without too much
hacking and slashing. I have a reasonable budget for a few days' time to
work with someone remotely in two phases, first being the answering of
questions and mapping functionality to tools, and the second phase being a
small proof deployment in our lab with all the attendant services wired up.
I have gotten pretty far reading the lists and bug reports, but I am at the
end of my expertise and having a more experienced person work with me would
be ideal. The issues I have that I am looking to address, which I believe
can be done in Foreman, are:
*Fog Development - We will be deploying to a vCloud environment primarily,
but will be deploying to AWS, Rackspace, and Azure later. I see there are
Chef knife addins to talk to vCD, and some Fog work in 1.9 to encompass it
into the upstream code, but I need to wire it up to Foreman, so I am
assuming there will be plugin or code development around this.
*Multi-tenancy - I am hoping to use Locations and Organizations to help
split up our clients' workloads. I'll want to be able to add new clients
and their deployment endpoints regularly.
*API Only - I will have access to the Foreman GUI, but everything we do is
API driven, so I will need a lot of help wiring up general API calls that
have the right inputs to build and deploy applications. This will, I think,
include plugins like foreman_resources to help us instantiate defined types
in Puppet via API.
*Parameter and Class Design - I am using Hiera now, but since I must drive
these instance creations in Foreman, I'm looking for a smart way to have
Foreman have default values and overrides, likely using Smart Parameters.
It's working, but I think it can be improved.
*De-duplication of work and settings - I want to build sane defaults for a
lot of things in Foreman (Locations, Orgs, Hostgroups, etc) and basically
just need to bounce the structure I am building off someone with more
experience to validate and critique it.
Wherever possible I would like to build the solution using as little custom
code that works with our systems where possible, I'd be incredibly happy to
contribute most of this work back to the community. I should have the
budget for this approved by early May, and depending upon how the POC works
out if I can get Foreman into the final design there could be at least an
ongoing contracting deal, if not a remote full-time position. I'm looking
for people who have built these systems in production before, so please
make sure you'd be a fit before asking to fill the role. Please reply to
the thread for general questions or clarification, I'm sure I missed some
details that need to be added to the request. I appreciate any help any of
you can provide in helping me get set up with this, there are no finders
fees or anything but keep in mind I'm going to hopefully be paying for good
development to be fed back into the main project, and expose you to a
really cool multi-cloud deployment environment.
Thanks everyone,
-Jared Ballou