The Foreman Story

We realized we needed an External Node Classifier (ENC) for our Puppet environments in 2011, after it became clear that iClassify would no longer be a viable solution for the future. (The author of iClassify, Adam Jacob, had moved on to write Chef.) After evaluating our options, we narrowed it down to Puppet Dashboard, and Foreman. It turned out at the time, Puppet Dashboard wasn't really an ENC, and was largely just a reports processor and dashboard, for monitoring the status of Puppet runs. We looked at Foreman, and functionality-wise, even in 2011, it had a fully featured API, and full ENC support, not to mention bare-metal provisioning options, which we didn't need at the time. Shortly after migrating to Foreman we realized that we needed a way to pull lists of hosts out of Foreman for other management purposes. This led to us writing a tool, that eventually got fleshed out into the first official Foreman CLI, called "foremancli". It was fairly basic, in that it could only pull information out of a foreman server, but it did meet our most pressing needs. We started development on foremancli's successor, hammer, but we got busy, and with RedHat really building up their Foreman team and having human-power to spare, we handed off further development of Hammer to RedHat. At some point along the way, The theforeman.org infrastructure needed to grow, and we offered to host a number of their servers, including their build environments, website and wiki. (This was around the time that the website was refactored to actually not look terrible.) We still sponsor the project in this way. Currently, we also still contribute to the project via bug reports, and testing pre-release builds. Over the years we have organized many Foreman talks in the New York City area, and have generally tried to support this great project any way we can.

A few things of note

• Foreman was the first ENC to support parameterized classes (Well before Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Dashboard)
• Foreman over the years has become much more modular and can now works with Salt, Ansible, Chef as well as Puppet.
• In addition to the bare-metal provisioning that Foreman has always supported Foreman can now provision VMs in almost all Cloud providers, including EC2, Rackspace, and Google, as well as any OpenStack environment. In addition VMs can be provisioned in VMWare, kvm and Xen.
• Docker container management is now supported

All in all Foreman is a very healthy Open Source project, with many wonderful contributors, that keeps getting better and better.