CloudForms 4.6 provided the ability to run embedded Ansible playbooks as methods, and it can be useful to include such a playbook in an existing workflow such as the VM Provision state machine.

One of the exciting new features in CloudForms 4.6 within Automate is Embedded Methods. That is, one can store reusable, directly callable, ruby code within Automate and access from other Automate Methods.

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:

Most systems use Access Control Lists (ACL’s) to manage user’s access to objects. Common examples are ACL’s for file systems, LDAP, Web Servers and many more. Anyone who has had to create ACL rules and maintain them knows how complicated this can be. To make access control easy again, CloudForms uses tags. If the group a user belongs to has the same tag as the accessed object, access is granted, if not, access is denied.

In this post, we speak with Peter McGowan, author of Mastering CloudForms Automation, to find out about his interest in CloudForms automation and the process behind bringing his book to reality. You can download an electronic copy of the book from the Red Hat Customer Portal. (Addendum for CloudForms 4.5 & 4.6)

OpenStack Management with CloudForms