A few days ago, Michele Naldini posted a series on the [Red Hat Developer Blog] [https://developers.redhat.com] about how to build a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) using Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Red Hat CloudForms allows to more quickly deploy and scale Red Hat OpenStack Platform (also known as OSP) private clouds, combine existing IT infrastructure investments, and federate public cloud deployments. This series includes both background information and hands-on tips to implement a full SDDC in practice.
The first part of the series covers the introduction, the goals, some key information about OSP and more specifically Heat, OSP configuration, and pre-requisites. It also illustrates how to start working with OSP in order to spin a new operating service based on a 3 tier deployment (2 web servers, 2 app servers, and 1 database) using 2 load balancers (1 for the web servers and 1 for the app servers).
The second part focuses on CloudForms, where it shows how to create a service based on Heat templates, using service dialog, and how to restrict services to a set of users. Both Operator UI and the Self-Service UI are used in the exercise. The blog series also contains a summary video that covers all steps explained as part of the deployment. Read more on the Red Hat Developer Blog:

You are about to read d-m-u’s latest blog post. So it goes. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Center yourself. It’s a difficult task, as you know. We got a bunch of robot computer people sittin’ around with their faces stuffed in computer screens. Breathe. Ignore all the robot computer people commotion around you.

Wohoo! It’s here again! All the features we were working on over the truly Fine summer, are now released in new version, Gaprindashvili.

Vote for the H-Release!!! Here is the Poll on talk.manageiq.org

Service catalog bundles are a really useful CloudForms feature that enable us to mix and match various existing service catalog items together to form bundles of tasks.

One of the more useful examples of a bundle is to create a new VM, and then run an Ansible Tower job template on the resulting VM to configure it with an application role. If we have an Ansible Tower server added to our CloudForms installation as an automation provider, this is quite simple. We described the procedure to configure an Ansible Tower provider in CloudForms as part of our previous series on Ansible Tower integration in CloudForms 4.1.

In this example we’ll combine two existing service catalog items. The first creates a new CentOS 7 virtual machine in a Red Hat Virtualization provider, and the second installs a simple LAMP stack using a job template defined in an Ansible Tower server, attached to CloudForms as an automation provider.

Each standalone catalog item has its own service dialog. The dialog for the VM provision service simply prompts for the service name and VM name, as follows:

Few days ago one of our fellows, Christian Jung, published a very good article explaining best practices while coding Ruby code inside Red Hat CloudForms. The post does not claim to be exhaustive, but establishes guidelines about coding, naming conventions and rules to follow in order to make the code cleaner, easier to understand, and more consumable by others.

In the article, several key topics are discussed, such as:

A Puzzle for your Perusal

We’ve just built Fine-4. This release contains bug fixes, UI tweaks, and stabilization.

This blog is part 5 of our series on Container Management with CloudForms].

In this last post, we focus on financial management of container environments for both chargeback and for optimizing infrastructure resource usage and spending.

The API has been growing quickly thanks to our many contributors. In an effort to help new contributors get up to speed quickly, it was about time for a blog post to explain the process of adding in a new collection and subcollection, as well as provide some examples for commonly asked questions.