We are gearing up for an open source release in the coming weeks, and you’re probably curious what all the fuss is about. What you’ll find here is some introductory information and ways to sign up for news and, eventually, pre-release code as we get closer to the project launch. Read Red Hat’s press release – it will give you the background information you need.

As I mentioned in the previous blog post, it’s a great day to be in the cloud. Yesterday marked our announcement at the OpenStack Summit, and the reaction was pretty swift and positive. There is pent-up demand for software that lets others take control of their clouds and virtualization environments.

The wait is over—ManageIQ is now open source!

Here’s a great introduction written by Bryan Che, a Red Hat cloud strategy guy, on why we released ManageIQ as an open source project, as well as a look at the cloud management landscape. Cloud management is currently a nice car with four flat tires, and all four of them with different sizes, colors, and recommended pressure.

When we originally open-sourced ManageIQ, the ManageIQ GitHub Repo was integrated with Code Climate. Integrating with Code Climate allowed the developer community to find code with too much complexity and/or duplication and refactor it.

This week, we integrated the ManageIQ GitHub Repo with Travis CI, the continuous integration service. This service runs on each GitHub pull request to ensure that no new code is breaking existing tests (i.e. no regression). If the pull request does cause a regression, the core maintainers of the ManageIQ project will not merge it until this is resolved.

So, keep creating pull requests to make ManageIQ better, but make sure that they do not break any tests!

Thanks, chessbyte

Things have been rolling along here at the ManageIQ community, and we’re proud to announce that the first release candidate is now ready. The first release for ManageIQ is called “Anand”, named after world champion chess player Viswanathan Anand.

To download a release candidate build of Anand, proceed to the download page. To get the source for Anand, see the tagged GitHub repo.

To get an idea of what is included in Anand, see the results of the previous sprint. To see what is coming next, take a look at the roadmap.

Enjoy! Remember, if you find any issues, please report them.

-JM

Now that the Anand release is almost out the door, it’s the right time to turn our attention to the next release. Since we’re going alphabetically by chess world champions, we have a few choices:

As we wind down the Anand release cycle, the next one is winding up: a vote to determine the next release name, a call for feature blueprints, and a call for participation for the very first ManageIQ Design Summit.

The votes are in, and “Botvinnik” is the winner! In planning for Botvinnik (which we’ll sometimes shorten to “bot”) we’re now accepting blueprints for proposed features. Just submit your blueprint and make sure to categorize it properly. Next, you’ll need to propose an abstract for the ManageIQ Design Summit. Make sure to put your proposal in the Abstracts category.

If you’d like to volunteer to put together the upcoming ManageIQ Design Summit, let it be known in the comments section of this blog post. We will start having weekly meetings for the purpose of putting together the agenda, and we need volunteers to review abstracts and potential speakers.

Download ManageIQ Anand

We are thrilled to announce that Aaron Patterson (@tenderlove) has joined the ManageIQ team.

We’re happy to announce the preliminary agenda for the upcoming ManageIQ Design Summit, a 2-day event on October 7 & 8 in Montvale, NJ. Be sure to RSVP soon, as space is very limited. As mentioned in the title, it’s a small intimate gathering of cloud experts, those interested in pushing the limits of ManageIQ and setting the roadmap for development. If you’re a ManageIQ user who wants to learn how to make the most of its automation and orchestration capabilities, then there will be plenty for you, too:

We just finished up the Sprint 12 demo, ended September 9.

I think most know who follow this blog that I have started posting some video content on Cloudforms as thats quite and easy way to digest or see it for real. Here’s a link to videos on my cloudformsnow youtube channel

John Hardy and Brad Ascar stopped by the studio to discuss their talks at the upcoming ManageIQ Design Summit on October 7 & 8 in Mahwah, NJ

Aaron Patterson joined us from Russia on this fun podcast, covering many topics, from the Rails 4 migration and the ManageIQ Design Summit to why you should “just use Ruby”.

Unless you’ve been under a rock the last few days, you’ve no doubt heard of the Shellshock vulnerability affecting a large number of *nix machines with the Bash shell installed. Note: Bash doesn’t even need to be the default shell - plenty of ‘Dash’ users are also affected. Luckily, there’s a way to avoid this mess - a policy management engine in ManageIQ, combined with VM fleecing, that lets you route around the vulnerability, turning off VMs that are vulnerable. This video gives you the goods:

Jason Frey is a long-time contributor and architect for the ManageIQ and CloudForms world. If you want to know anything about ManageIQ, he’s your guy. Watch and learn from the following video.

Here is something I get a lot, “How can I make a service with multiple service items, but then conditional drop some during the deployment?” Eg. You have a Service Dialog like this one here:

For some time now, Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the founding members of the ManageIQ Community, has been hard at work on a “cloud broker”. “What is a cloud broker,” you may ask? It’s a nice tool that allows individuals to pick and choose various service offerings from multiple sources, without knowing (or caring) which cloud or virtualization platform supplies the services. That they chose ManageIQ as the platform of record to build on speaks volumes to the hard work those engineers have put in over the last 8 years.

Travis CI

We have been using travis ci for running our tests automatically on each merge and pull request soon after we open sourced ManageIQ.

We are happy to announce that we are moving forward with the ManageIQ Extensions Depot! The Extensions Depot is a place for the ManageIQ Community to share policies, dialogs, state machines and other items of interest to the greater community.

With the recent announcement of Amazon’s AWS Config service, there is a Pull Request to integrate with it. The integration will allow ManageIQ to use the AWS Config service as an event source to our Amazon Provider. These events can be used to drive many things inside ManageIQ, including inventory refreshes, policies and automate workflows. Once this Pull Request is merged, our appliance (which is built nightly) will have that functionality incorporated. Until then, if you want to play with the proposed integration, take the code changes from the pull request and integrate them into your appliance or development environment.

Earlier this week, we mentioned moving to ruby 2 on our github repository and in travis-ci for testing. Ruby 2 nightly build appliances based on sprint 15 are available here.

The ManageIQ Depot will be where community members can collaborate, share and download extensions and other software developed for the ManageIQ hybrid cloud management platform. I made a quick video showing how to grab the latest depot code from GitHub, add your extension, and then test it locally before issuing a pull request to add it to the git repository.

Here is the list of GEMs and their info that are included in the CLOUDFORMS 5.3.0 appliance. I thought it would be useful to post, I need this recently for some work I am doing. It was really easy as most things in CLOUDFORMS usually are I simply wrote some ruby to utilise an existing… Read Original Post

Here is a lab I put together for a recent event, it was well received and I think it is very valuable to the ManageIQ and CloudForms user bases. In the lab you will GET and POST RESTapi actions. Its a basic look at some common use cases such as, Query a VM’s hardware inventory. Read the rest

It’s that time again - today at 10:30am EST is the latest sprint report. If you’re interested in hearing what’s on the roadmap, you’ll want to join us on a web conference.

This is recording of the Sprint 16 report from Wednesday, Dec 3. To see the newest features from this sprint, download the latest bleeding edge Botvinnik image.

Join us at the Booz Allen Hamilton offices in Herndon, VA for the first ManageIQ meetup. Learn about the latest features under development in Botvinnik as well as how Booz Allen extended ManageIQ with the Jellyfish cloud broker project.

We can now take the covers off of the ManageIQ Community Depot and show it to you live. Just understand it’s in beta and may (will) have some bugs. The Depot is where you can share, download and collaborate on extensions and other software built for ManageIQ.