Foreman templating engine - best practises and future

Marek Hulán - Monday, Feb 6, 15:40 - 16:20 - B2.015

In this talk about Foreman templating engine, I'd like to show some tips how to write templates in a way they are readable, less prone to errors and compatible with future versions of Foreman. Also I'd like to show some debugging techniques. I'll explain what safe mode is and what are consequences of disabling it. Demo will also cover popular foreman_templates plugin. I plan to show how it can be used to manage templates using git and cover recently added features. At the end I'd like to discuss current limitations and sketch possible improvements like formalisation of template inputs and replacing internal object usage with more macros.

How to get the most of Foreman and Chef

Marek Hulán - Tuesday, February 7, 15:40 - 16:20 - B3.019

In this talk I'd like to explain what benefits users can get by using powerful combination of Foreman and Chef. After short introduction to Foreman, I'll demonstrate how easily we can deploy a new host and plug it into Chef infrastructure.

Demo will contain monitoring infrastructure in Foreman based on data coming from Chef, investigating reports from previous client runs, manipulating the client runlist from Foreman UI, using Foreman parameter system in cookbooks in combination with Chef attributes, on demand triggering of client runs on multiple hosts through Foreman remote execution plugin.

Slides are available on GitHub.

About Marek Hulán

Marek is software engineer in RedHat working on Foreman project. He worked on Foreman installer framework called Kafo, networking provisioning through Foreman templates, and recently remote execution plugin allowing automation of tasks that does not fit into configuration management. In his free time he works on Chef integration with Foreman.