Mastering CloudForms Automation: An Essential Guide for Cloud Administrators

Learn how to work with the Automate feature of CloudForms, the powerful Red Hat cloud management platform that lets you administer your virtual infrastructure, including hybrid public and private clouds. This practical hands-on introduction shows you how to increase your operational efficiency by automating day-to-day tasks that now require manual input.

Throughout the book, author Peter McGowan provides a combination of theoretical information and practical coding examples to help you learn the Automate object model. With this CloudForms feature, you can create auto-scalable cloud applications, eliminate manual decisions and operations when provisioning virtual machines and cloud instances, and manage your complete virtual machine lifecycle.

In six parts, this book helps you:

• Learn the objects and concepts for developing automation scripts with CloudForms Automate
• Customize the steps and workflows involved in provisioning virtual machines
• Create and use service catalogs, items, dialogs, objects, bundles, and hierarchies
• Use CloudForm’s updated workflow to retire and delete virtual machines and services
• Orchestrate and coordinate with external services as part of a workflow
• Explore distributed automation processing as well as argument passing and handling

Table of Contents

Part I. Working with CloudForms Automate
Chapter 1. Introduction to CloudForms
Chapter 2. Introduction to the Automate Datastore
Chapter 3. Writing and Running Our Own Automation Scripts
Chapter 4. Using Schema Variables
Chapter 5. Working with Virtual Machines
Chapter 6. Peeping Under the Hood
Chapter 7. $evm and the Workspace
Chapter 8. A Practical Example: Enforcing Anti-Affinity Rules
Chapter 9. Using Tags from Automate
Chapter 10. Investigative Debugging
Chapter 11. Ways of Entering Automate
Chapter 12. Requests and Tasks
Chapter 13. State Machines
Chapter 14. More Advanced Schema Features
Chapter 15. Event Processing

Part II. Provisioning Virtual Machines
Chapter 16. Provisioning a Virtual Machine
Chapter 17. The Provisioning Profile
Chapter 18. Approval
Chapter 19. Quota Management
Chapter 20. The Options Hash
Chapter 21. The Provisioning State Machine
Chapter 22. Customizing Virtual Machine Provisioning
Chapter 23. Virtual Machine Naming During Provisioning
Chapter 24. Virtual Machine Placement During Provisioning
Chapter 25. The Provisioning Dialog
Chapter 26. Virtual Machine Provisioning Objects
Chapter 27. Creating Provisioning Requests Programmatically
Chapter 28. Integrating with Satellite 6 During Provisioning

Part III. Working with Services
Chapter 29. Service Dialogs
Chapter 30. The Service Provisioning State Machine
Chapter 31. Catalog{Item,Bundle}Initialization
Chapter 32. Approval and Quota
Chapter 33. Creating a Service Catalog Item
Chapter 34. Creating a Service Catalog Bundle
Chapter 35. Service Objects
Chapter 36. Log Analysis During Service Provisioning
Chapter 37. Service Hierarchies
Chapter 38. Service Reconfiguration
Chapter 39. Service Tips and Tricks

Part IV. Retirement
Chapter 40. Virtual Machine and Instance Retirement
Chapter 41. Service Retirement

Part V. Integration
Chapter 42. Calling Automation Using the RESTful API
Chapter 43. Automation Request Approval
Chapter 44. Calling External Services

Part VI. Miscellaneous
Chapter 45. Distributed Automation Processing
Chapter 46. Argument Passing and Handling
Chapter 47. Miscellaneous Tips