Evgeni Golov
Debian Developer, Red Hat Engineer, ♥ automation
Sessions
To upgrade the operating system underneath an application, everybody should just redeploy said application on a new system, which thanks to automation is both easy and fast.
After recovering from the shock of reading "just", "easy" and "fast" in once sentence, we have to realize that a fresh deployment is not always the easiest/fastest path forward, or maybe not even possible at all. This is where distributions come to help us by offering support for major upgrades "in place".
For Enterprise Linux such upgrades are done by Leapp, which is both a framework to orchestrate complex upgrades and a collection of helpers (so called actors) for upgrading Enterprise Linux setups with common applications installed.
However, "common applications" might not include the one you are developing and have deployed on-premises at many customers.
In this talk we will show how we developed the custom actors required for upgrading Foreman from EL8 to EL9, which challenges we faced and which shortcuts we took.
I was asked to submit a Steve Ballmer style "Automation! Automation! Automation!" lightning talk, but that's really not my style.
So let's instead talk about containers!
Especially containers for Foreman.
Suiteable for running in production, with plugins and auxilary services like Candlepin and Pulp.
Running like normal system services with Podman and systemd or on your Kubernetes cluster.
We've had a Dockerfile in the main Foreman repository for over 5 years (May 2019), have been publishing it to Quay for a long time and I've heard people actually been using it. But it's not flexible (no plugins!), mainly aimed at developers and not well maintained overall (no CI until 2023!).
In this talk we will present the current iteration (luckily not actually #42!) of a possible design for running a production Foreman with plugins, bells and whistles in a container environment. We will also discuss what this (probably) means for future deployments on Foreman and upgrades of existing setups.