The Foreman and puppet combination

The Foreman & Puppet

Contents

What is Puppet

What is Foreman

Benefits of using both.

Provisioning Demo.

Puppet

Puppet is configuration management tool that gives admins an approach to installing and configuring additional software that is relatively independent of the underlying operating system. The supported operating systems are the most popular Linux distributions, Unix, and now also Windows. 

Foreman
Known as a “complete server life cycle management tool,” Foreman arrived on the scene over 4 years ago and is supported by community-driven popularity and momentum. The open source project’s Github repository is actively maintained by a core team and supported by a legion of community volunteers and contributors. Foreman is also used in Linux distributions such as RDO and RHOS (Red Hat OpenStack distribution) two freely-available, community-supported distributions of OpenStack.

1)     Provisioning

2)     Configuration

3)     Monitor hosts

Provision from anywhere
Bare metal, Amazon EC2, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, Libvirt, oVirt, VMware, and many other providers allow you to manage a hybrid cloud through Foreman.

Configuration

An external node classifier, hiera-like parameters, and reports monitoring for Puppet, Salt and Chef are included. Completely ready to tweak host groups in your data center.

Monitoring Hosts

Foreman reports will tell you exactly what happened in your nodes, and alert you when things go awry. See in your dashboard which hosts are healthy, and which ones are outdated.

Smart Proxy Architecture
The heart of Foreman’s easy integration capabilities is its Smart Proxy Architecture, which provides a RESTful API for hooking into and extending various subsystems like Puppet, Chef, or SaltStack. Smart Proxy components reside on or near machines that perform specific functions and facilitate Foreman’s orchestration efforts. Out-of-the-box, Smart Proxies support DHCP, DNS, TFTP, as well as connectivity to tools like Puppet and Chef.

Plugin Power
Foreman was written in Ruby and can be extended through the creation of plugins (also written in Ruby). Additionally, a plethora of freely available plugins exists to add further functionality to the tool.

Demo Requirements

·        We need to install the puppet aws module in our puppet master and can be import in our foreman using import classes.

·     We can get the all foreman reports related to our hosts and also related to puppet changes as well.

To install the sample ntp module follow the below command and it will install the ntp module in specified location. After that if you goto Import puppet Classes option we can import ntp related puppet classes in foreman and make changes and also we can apply particular class to our nodes.
 

puppet module install -i /etc/puppet/environments/production/modules saz/ntp

Simple puppet code

References
theforeman.org 
https://puppet.com/docs

In Next post I will configure puppet with foreman from the scratch in AWS.