Bring order to the system jungle with Foreman
Team Leader
© Lead Image © satori, 123RF.com
Orchestration tools such as Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack provide uniform management of a system landscape, but they can't do everything. Foreman fills in the gaps and installs a uniform interface that makes the admin's life a lot easier.
Administrators are faced with managing an infrastructure jungle. Although orchestration tools can solve many problems, they do not handle everything in the overall structure – from bare metal without an operating system to the server. Things like an install server for bare metal and a solution for managing IP addresses can, in principle, be accomplished, but at the cost of individual configuration. That prompted Israeli Ohad Levy to program the missing links himself; thus was Foreman born.
A Self-Programmed Deployment Tool
Starting with Puppet, Foreman provides a parameterized install server that also allows the installation of FreeBSD, Solaris, or even Juniper Zero Touch Provisioning for some switch series (as is the case for most Linux derivatives and their installation mechanisms, such as Kickstart or Preseed).
If the managed system is installed and the Puppet client is also installed using the template parameters, Foreman implements the preconfigured Puppet classes. Searching for the next available IP address also usually proves to be a troublesome operation in practice, but Foreman can freely assign IP addresses when creating a new host or simply take the next available IP from the network pool, including entries from DNS – both forward and backward.
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