Foreman Birthday 2020

Foreman Birthday Party – online! For 11 years now, the Foreman project has facilitated the management of large server infrastructures and is a popular open source component among administrators. Ohad Levy gave the starting signal for the Foreman project on 13.07 2009 with his first git commit. He doesn’t have to work on Foreman by himself. To date, about 450 other developers* have contributed about 8600 commits to the Foreman main project.

Foreman is now more than just an interface for Puppet to provision new servers. The platform can be extended via plugins to a complete lifecycle management tool and can be used to manage large server landscapes with Ansible, Chef, Saltstack, Puppet, patch and package management via Katello, OpenSCAP integration, etc.

Foreman is now more than just an interface for Puppet to provision new servers. The project is currently at a turning point: Foreman 2.0 was released a few months ago and the community is working on other major changes. Reason enough for a proper Foreman birthday party. This year the celebration took place virtually as a video conference. But this was not a disadvantage at all: The Online Party had the advantage that developers* and project interested people from all over the world could participate. On average 40 people were present – from the USA, Europe, and India.

I could summarize every presentation now – but thanks to the virtual conference we have everything on video 😉 Therefore, I will simply refer to the presentations here:

Foreman Birthday Party 2020 – Welcome from ATIX AG’s Mark Hlawatschek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scFrpIakVcU

Foreman Community Survey 2020 Results – Greg Sutcliffe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lolwYZUnyKg

Making Puppet Optional – Tomer Brisker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvY_ql9OrLk

Contributing to Foreman without Writing Code – Maximilian Kolb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfyk30_TkmQ

Katello Pulp 3 and Me – Justin Sherrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6HsSm10DLk

After these presentations, there was a relaxed exchange and we admired many a remote office workstation from sofa to standing workstation to historical computer equipment in the background. For data protection reasons, there is (unfortunately) no recording of this 🙂

And another “positive” thing: Traditionally, there is of course a cake at a birthday party. This year we did without this and instead donate the money to https://www.savethechildren.org/. This is how 166€ came together! Many thanks to all donators*.

In conclusion, we can say that the Online Foreman Birthday Party 2020 was a complete success and hopefully next year we can all get together again. The idea, however, is that future Foreman Birthday Parties should be a “hybrid conference” – presence event and online video conference in one!