Thought I would write a blog about CloudForms 4.0, which I am the Product Manager for. I am mega proud and thankful of the engineering effort in the community and at Red Hat. Here are some insights into whats in the drop, whats coming for General Release in early December.
If you have been keeping up-to-date with the ManageIQ sprints on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/user/ManageIQVideo) you would have seen some mega additions to the platform, also the community has a changelog for their Capablanca release that serves as the base for Red Hat CloudForms 4.0 here https://github.com/ManageIQ/manageiq/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md
Here is a summary on the main items.
Availability
You can now run CloudForms on Microsoft HyperV natively!
- Microsoft HyperV/SCVMM VHD
- VMware vSphere OVA
- Red Hat Virtualization OVF
- OpenStack QCOW2
- Amazon AMI (CCP Program)
Providers
- Google Kubernetes (Containers) – Inventory, Cross-Linking, Metrics (Dec), Events, NEW Dashboards, NEW Topology Viewer & SmartState Technology for Docker Images.
- OpenShift Enterprise (PaaS) – Inventory, Cross-Linking, Metrics (Dec), Events, NEW Dashboards, NEW Topology Viewer & SmartState Technology for Docker Images.
- Inventory – Projects, Services, Routes, Replicators, Pods, Containers, Container Images, Registries and Nodes.
- Cross-Linking – Enables you to link through from the Node to the underlying Host. Example – OpenShift Node maybe installed on a Virtual Machine, Cross-Linking allows when both the OpenShift/Kubernetes Provider AND the Virtual Machine provider are present in CloudForms to expose the relationship between PaaS and IaaS, very cool and unique to CloudForms! Supported for VMware, RHEV and OpenStack.
- Metrics – Get CPU, Memory & Network realtime metics for Nodes, Pods and Containers.
- Events – Pods Starting, Stopping, Out Of Disk Space etc..Can be used to drive automation and policy state management.
- NEW Dashboards – Brand new Dashboards being prototyped for Containers with rich graphics, heat maps, donut charts with metric and inventory detail.
- NEW Topology Viewer – Bran new Topology Viewer being prototyped for Containers. Mega cool floaty topology map of OpenShift or Kubernetes Clusters, displaying the Cross-Linking right through to the running containers in the pods.
- SmartState – A core CloudForms competency found in Virtual and Cloud platforms is also available on both Kubernetes and OpenShift. Docker images backing running containers can be SmartState Analyzed for package detail including name, version.
- Microsoft Azure (Cloud) – Inventory, Power and Orchestration Stack Provisioning
- Inventory – Regions, Zones, Instance/Virtual Machines
- Power Operations – Control Virtual Machines power states, stop/start/terminate.
- Orchestration Stack Provisioning – Deploy multi tiered applications in Microsoft Azure Cloud using stack provisioning. Simply give CloudForms the stack template, either from a blog, market place or self author and CloudForms will automatically create for you the Dialog and Service for the Service Catalog.
- OpenStack (Cloud) – Lots of behind the scenes things as wells more power operations
- Neutron Inventory – Models and refreshers for future networking providers.
- Power Operations – Added Pause and Stop.
- Keystone V3 – Support for KS3 authentication.
- VMware vSphere (Virtual) – Support for VMware vSphere 6
- Red Hat Virtualization (Virtual) – Support for Red Hat Virtualization 3.5
- Amazon EC2 – Support for new instance types.
- Foreman/Satellite 6 – Additional parameters exposed to reporting.
User Interface
- Self-Service UI – A brand new UI for CloudForms. This is the 1.0 release of the Self Service UI, featuring a modern look and feel that has big potential. For this release its aim is parity with the existing Operation UI Service Catalog.
- One thing to note on this new UI its main contributor is the community member Booze Allen Hamilton.
- Another thing more techie is that the UI is 100% RESTapi driven, so if you wish to automate anything you see, simply grab the RESTapi call for it and off you go.
- Lastly, we have a great roadmap for this in forth coming releases, stay tuned!
- Operations UI – As mentioned above for the Container providers OpenShift and Kubernetes we get a Topology Viewer and new Dashboards.
- Other changes include dynamic fields, angular conversions.
- Simplified Chinese Language Support (Dec)
- Updates to charts to allow sum of values.
- New donut charts.
- Conversion of UI ongoing to BootStrap/Patternfly.
Tenancy
Huge effort behind the introduction of Tenancy to the core CloudForms platform. Tenancy in CloudForms 4.0 allows for resources like VMs, Hosts, Nodes, Pod, Containers etc..anything can be partitioned by tenant. New tenants can be created, sub tenancy is supported too!
Here are some of the areas that have been worked in to support the new Tenancy design;
- Quotas – An extensible quota management model for tenants supporting CPU, Memory Storage and Counts per tenant.
- Automate Domains, Service Catalogs, Catalog Items – Partitioned by tenant.
- UI – Many enhancements to support Tenancy, such as Groups, Users, New roles for RBAC.
REST API
- Ability to import reports – As its says, upload reports from RESTapi
- Roles CRUD – Create, Update and Delete Roles
- Chargeback Rates CRUD – Create, Update and Delete Charge Back Rate Tables
- Reports run action – Run Reports from a RESTapi Call.
- Report results collection – Return the results of a Reports in JSON over RESTapi.
Appliance
The core operating system platform to the appliance has gone through its biggest changes since before open sourcing. As CloudForms is a Virtual Appliance it contains everything you need to start with no additional servers or appliances being required for initial use (poke the competition with their minimum 3 server footprints).
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1
- PostgreSQL 9.4.1
- Apache 2.4
- jQuery 1.9.1
- Rails 4
- Ruby 2
- Changed file system from ext4 to xfs
- Application restructuring to match Rails application framework
Security
We have also done and continue to do lots of work around security. For those who know where I was before this venture, you can appreciate I know how important this is. We want ManageIQ & CloudForms to be globally adopted as the defacto standard in Cloud Management Platforms. To reach that goal we need to ensure that all users can run our platform in production. Areas of focus have been
- STIG – Security Template Implementation Guide
- SCAP – Security Content Automation Protocol (Dec)
Finally…..
We removed something!
SOAP Server – We removed the SOAP Server as it was incompatible with some of the platform changes we were making and we have the RESTapi to take its place. See here an earlier post on RESTapi to get yourself started quickly… http://cloudformsnow.com/2014/12/03/restapi-a-teach-yourself-lab/