Launching Custom Image VMs on Azure With Ansible

Part of my Job is making sure our customers can run our software in Public clouds.  Recently, I was able to get CloudForms Management Engine (CFME) to deploy to Azure. Once I got it done manually, I wanted to automate the deployment, and that means Ansible.  Turns out that launching custom images from Ansible is not support int the current GA version of the Azure modules, but has been implemented upstream.

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OpenStack Role Assignment Inheritance for CloudForms

Operators expect to use CloudForms to perform administrative tasks. For this reason, the documentation for OpenStack states that the Keystone user must have an admin role. We found at least one case, however, where this was not sufficient. Fortunately, we have a better approach, and one that can lead to success in a wider array of deployments.

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Different CloudForms Catalogs for Different Groups

One of the largest value propositions of DevOps is the concept of Self Service provisioning. If you can remove human interaction from resource allocation, you can reduce both the response time and the likelihood of error in configuration. Red Hat CloudForms has a self service feature that allows a user to select from predefined services. You may wish to show different users different catalog items. This might be for security reasons, such as the set of credentials required and provided, or merely to reduce clutter and focus the end user on specific catalog items. Perhaps some items are still undergoing testing and are not ready for general consumption.

Obviously, these predefined services may not match your entire user population.

I’ve been working on setting up a CloudForms instance where members of different groups see different service catalogs. Here is what I did.
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