Heute: ATIX Informationstechnologie und Consulting AG
Developing Open Source Software at ATIX
We are an IT service provider in the field of infrastructure. We focus on Linux in the data center because we love open source, open standards, and automation and deliver customized Linux and open source solutions for your business success.
Our engineering team creates orcharhino, which is an enterprise solution with commercial support for orchestrating data centers. You can automate your deployments and configuration management as well as your lifecycle and patch management.
What Is orcharhino?
orcharhino is a life cycle management tool for both physical and virtual servers. You can automate recurring tasks, provision hosts, deploy content, configure servers, and manage content including software packages, Puppet modules, and security errata. This allows you to serve versioned content to managed hosts. You can manually upload packages or - more conveniently - enter remote repositories and set up synchronisation plans.
orcharhino contains bug fixes and features from multiple versions of used open source applications, such as Foreman, Katello, and Pulp. This allows us to stabilize orcharhino to a degree open source software cannot offer itself. Our development process benefits from all insights we gain while developing Foreman, from manual and automated internal tests, internal quality assurance, and customer feedback.
On the other hand, we develop bleeding edge features for the upcoming version of Foreman. This blog article focuses on how we play our part in the open source community and how the Foreman SCC Manager plugin helps you to simplify managing content for hosts running SLES. You can have a look at our blog for more details about other open source contributions.
What Is the Foreman SCC Manager Plugin?
ATIX develops and maintains the Foreman SCC Manager plugin, which connects your SUSE Customer Center (SCC) account to your Foreman instance to simplify managing SUSE content. It is indispensable to everyone using Foreman and Katello to deploy and serve content to hosts running SLES. The plugin adds a *SUSE Subscriptions* page to your content menu where you can add your SCC account details and select. You can then import products and repositories from SUSE into Katello with the click of a button and synchronise them without having to manually set up each remote repository.
Why Are We Redesigning the Foreman SCC Manager Plugin?
In 2021, we got feedback from the community and our customers indicating that the product selection process could be improved upon. We then made some internal mock-ups and thought of ways to improve this user workflow. Shortly after, we presented our idea to the community and asked for feedback. Together with the general process of Foreman plugins switching over to React, we have decided in late 2021 to redesign the Foreman SCC Manager plugin to make its usage more convenient. The redesign happens in a fully open process, which means we are pushing all stages to Github, including drafts, comments, and code reviews.
Up until now, the product selection was based on a tree of repositories from SUSE. Depending on your SUSE subscriptions, the tree can easily hold more than 1000 elements, which makes it a bit of a hassle to search for specific repositories.
With the new version, you can filter products based on product category, product version, and target host architecture. This returns only a specific subset of the tree structure. Once the redesign is finished and the PR is accepted, we will publish a new version and the iterative process of feedback, draft PRs, tests, reviews, and new versions starts again.
How Can I Participate in the Plugin Development?
We invite everyone, developers and users alike, to give feedback and participate:
- You can report bugs by raising issues on Github.
- You can add features by creating pull requests on Github.
- You can use Foreman SCC Manager and improve the documentation.
However, this is not the limit of our community involvement. We also regularly hold talks about the Foreman SCC Manager plugin, for example at the ForemanCon 2021. You can ask us questions or give feedback in the Foreman Community Forum and at Foreman Community Demos. We also provide free and open source documentation to efficiently manage SUSE Content within Foreman.
ATIX AG as Open Source Company
From its inception, ATIX was conceived as a Linux and open source company. In this context, we provide our customers with engineering, consulting, support, and training for various open source technologies including Foreman, Ansible, Salt, Puppet, Apache Kafka, Kubernetes, and more to automate and run a Linux based data center.
This blog article focuses on one among many plugins and open source contributions. For us, open source is so much more than just dumping code to Github. We participate and contribute to conferences like FrOSCon and Chemnitzer Linux-Tage, we organise the Munich "Linux Stammtisch" once every two months, and we have our own conference, the "Open Source Automation Days" (OSAD). Additionally, ATIX developers are present on all kinds of channels surrounding Foreman, most notably Github, IRC, the Foreman Community Forum, and the Foreman Community Demo. ATIX is honoured to be part of the vibrant open source community. From reporting bugs, developing features and bug fixes, and providing enterprise support - ATIX will be the Linux and open source company, now and in the future.
