Manageiq: Foreman Integration

[chessbyte]

@kbrock @bdunne @gmcculloug Add your design here and we will make sub-issues/PRs from this one.

[dLobatog]

Hi awesome ManageIQ folks, here's an (unasked) helping hand from the Foreman :construction_worker: team. I'm subscribing to the topic as this issue really gets to me every day.

As @kbrock @brandondunne and @gmcculloug pointed out, I agree with them. We have so many points in common we have potential to become a much better solution. It struck me especially now that I'm working on Docker support for Foreman and you guys have nailed it. In particular here's my take for what are the strongest points of each project that the other doesn't have:

Foreman strengths:

• Puppet ENC
• Puppet classes management
• Chef, Salt
• Better management of the lifecycle (change configurations, facts...)
• More lightweight, decoupled and pluggable SmartProxy (why did you choose that name too :tongue: ?)
• DHCP/DNS/TFTP management for bare metal and virtual
• Interface for plugins people are already using
• Customizable UI via plugins
• Content management via Katello & Pulp
• Concurrent orchestration via Foreman-tasks and Dynflow
• FreeIPA integration
• CLI (Hammer)
• Puppet-based installer
• Partition tables
• RBAC user system
• Larger community, and very large customers that give us great hints to make it more HA and scalable.

ManageIQ strengths:

• Providers discovery
• Scheduled provisioning
• Windows support
• Better VM-Hypervisor integration
• Smartstate analysis
• Capacity planning and data collection (awesome)
• Already setup image for installation
• Docker and Kubernetes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPVwOS9XOKY&feature=youtu.be (major congrats)

Tied:

• Images and OS
• PXE and IPMI
• Compute profiles
• UI/UX
• External authentication sources (LDAP, Amazon..)
• Audits

This is _a biased list_ as I work on the Foreman team, and my experience with ManageIQ is very little, please criticize.

@brandondunne I saw you started a topic on the ManageIQ community, any ideas?

In all honesty, part of the Foreman community (me included) think tons of parts of ManageIQ could very well go in Foreman core and plugins, and merging the projects (ForemanIQ :smirk:) would result in a better supported, well thought, experience for our users. I don't know if the opposite, bringing Foreman into ManageIQ would be easier. Obviously this is not my decision, and actually both projects are supposed to be separate as of now, just wanted to explain my feelings about both projects.

Hope you guys find this a tad useful, I'm ccing @ohadlevy and @domcleal since I believe you guys already met in flesh to talk these topics through, and they surely have something important to say.

[kbrock]

thanks @eLobato - talk is where we post most of these discussions. I replied over there.

[miq-bot]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not been updated for at least 6 months.

If you can still reproduce this issue on the current release or on master, please reply with all of the information you have about it in order to keep the issue open.

Thank you for all your contributions!

[JPrause]

@chessbyte looks like this issue has been open for some time and is now stale.
If this issue can be closed, can you do so.
Otherwise, if you'd like it to stay open, please remove the stale label.

[kbrock]

This feature shipped a while ago.