Does Redhat plan to offer opensource equivalent to redhat satellite 6/7(all in one solution)?

[charith1994]

 After SUSE forked the spacewalk codebase in 2018 with Uyuni-project RedHat has slow down their update to spacewalk while completely abandoned it on 31st May 2020 with 2.10 being the last official release.I was wondering whether Redhat Completely abandoned opensource considering they killing the centos project while replacing it with centos-stream. As a regular user of those two projects now I have been thinking about converting my self into more stable suse opensource ecosystem.I dont know how many people have experienced the same thing.If redhat keep doing this it will cause most of the opensource users of the ecosystem to move with Suse who has providing the same technologies with more stability to the opensource community.Hope redhat will offer replacement for spacewalk as well as centos .not the centos-stream,no one will fall for that)

[Lisenet]

It does already, it's called Foreman.

I'm sure that you are aware that Spacewalk is an upstream product for Red Hat Satellite 5. That version of Satellite has reached the EOF in May 2020. As a result you should aim to upgrade to the new version, which is Red Hat Satellite 6. Nothing to do with CentOS, nothing to do with "Red Hat abandoning open source". The Red Hat Satellite 5 project has reached its end of life, time to upgrade.

Red Hat Satellite 6 is a federation of several upstream open source projects, including Foreman, Katello, Pulp, Puppet (now Ansible) and Candlepin.

[charith1994]

Dear  friend,

foreman is only a one piece of the diy fruit salad redhat have left to its community to assemble if they want to make a equivalent to satellite ,it is not a proper stable all in one solution .Compared to lack of composite proper documentation  it wil be even harder for a newbie to understand about the project itself.Think about openstack without openstack.org without all documentation it has,and the all components scattered around the internet with separate docs.Is'nt the openstack foundation mean something to you now.if they collect all the components and build one site with proper documentation how each part working together to build satellites and all in one solution community to work with isn't the proper way?. Then we can call it    Redhat doing its thing........As I think if Redhat think about the open source community  around them more it's better to do things stable and well structured way.As for the centos it was such a waste of open source contribution of thousands of people nearly a decade put to waste for attaining  selfish organizational goal.Now isn't these all drama pushing their customers and community to accept their competitors  services and products ?.something to think about.

[Lisenet]

Thanks for your reply. What makes you say that it is not a proper stable all in one solution? Can you give me specific examples please so that we can discuss? Also, have you used Katello at all and if so, what was your experience?

I started using Katello when they released vesion 3.5 approximatelly 4 years ago, they are on 3.18 now. From my experience, it is as stable as an upstream project can get. Installation boils down to one single command really:

foreman-installer --scenario katello <args>

You get Foreman to provision your servers. There are several plugins available to integrate wilt libvirt, OpenStack, VMware and AWS EC2.  If you configure Pulp you get package repositories, and with Candlepin you get subscriptions. Configuration management is done by Puppet/Ansible.

In terms of documentation, it is all there, on https://theforeman.org. What is it in particular that you could not find there? Could you give me some examples to better understand "lack of composite proper documentation" please?

[Lisenet]

You can also use Red Hat's official documetation for Satellite if you want to, since most things apply to the upstream version as well.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_satellite/6.8/

[charith1994]

Dear Friend,

Just look at your reply itself and the content you try to prove your point of view . Rather than pointing out the single source of information, you have to mention two sources because of the doubt you have about the gap has in the two projects. Let me explain to you my point of view.

Lets take CNCF as a example

 CNCF (The Cloud Native Computing Foundation)

As you know above governing body has more than 1,200 projects under its wings. From their official website to their documentation it was well structured, planned, and systematically stable. They have a proper way of deploying their open-source projects to the community without sacrificing the quality of the product.

yes. I understand redhat is not a non-profit organization they have to make money from what they are building. But making their opensource projects upstream and using the community as for experimenting with their product can not be considered as a good opensource practice. As for the RedHat, many of the opensource community support their projects contributing to them in various kinds of ways. In return they get is an experimental product rather than a stable one.

As for the satellite,it is the same thing and more. Rather than a  stable all in one solution,u get an upstream and a bunch of parts scattered around the internet.it wasn't a big deal to them to make their projects more structured and govern with a predefined standard rather than pushing upstream to the community.Finally this is my point of view may be it will not be suitable in financial perspective view.But I hope  redhat will make their opensource projects govern in a centralized body with well structured and predefined standard.So more of the community can appreciate and interact with their opensource works.(I have to say when few years back I always google search to find the equivalent opensource of the commercial redhat product,their site was a mess back then.Finaly after ibm bought redhat they changed it properly)

[Lisenet]

There are two sources of information available: one for the upsteam Foreman project as I mentioned before, and one for Satellite which is a paid product. Not sure what you mean by "the gap has in the two projects", these are indeed two projects and each of them has their documentation.

To be honest with you, it is the same with OpenShift and OpenStack, there is official Red Hat documentation available for OpenShift/OpenStack platforms, and there is documentation available for upstream OKD as well as openstack.org (as you have mentioned previously).

Back to my previous question that you did not answer, have you used Katello at all? What is your experience? What is it that you could not find documented when deploying it?

I'd really like to see examples from your experience to understand "lack of composite proper documentation".

[charith1994 · Accepted solution]

Dear Friend,

I will never ask the above question without experiencing the drama myself. let me educate you. First, as I told you before I was a heavy user of Sattelite product before it comes to this change( before version 6).where they completely change the architecture of the product.

I have used satellite 5 in production as well as spacewalk in my personal projects. I have to say they have merely a little different other than redhat support. For your understanding that it was an example of an all in one product out of the box without integrating any third-party plugins. Just plug and play.

Then let's move to the Uyuni-project that I currently using after RedHat abandoned the spacewalk. So they offer 2 versions

1.Stable version

2.Develop version.

So there is a choice for anyone to choose upstream or a stable one. I have to say it was a lifesaver after spacewalk departure. Same functionality with some extra features with the stable codebase.

So as a long time redhat guy I have to check what they have to offer so try myself the satellite 6. I have to say bit complex ui compare to satellite 5 but easy setup and deploy, a proper solution. So for the opensource equivalent found that satellite 6 build upon few Redhat opensource projects binding together. Start the experiment with the foreman but I am not happy with its pluggable architecture which we can integrate kattelo ,pulp and candlepin as plugins to make it closer to satellite 6 functionality.But as an upstream project, its stability is questionable compared to more mature Uyuni which offers stable release. Making it more customizable mean devoting its stability. Considering Foreman is a upstream and immature compared to Uyuni ,its not reliable enough for me to make it my daily driver for daytoday work loads.My personal works heavily depend on opensource tools I always try to use a downstream variation of a product rather than upstream.So as for the spacewalk it was an exception which I trust with my years of continuous usage.(that time I dont have an alternative).

For your questions let me take one bite at a time.

1. "have you used Katello at all? What is your experience? What is it that you could not find documented when deploying it?"

yes I have.As I said before I will never ask a question without experiencing it myself.As for the technological perspective, it is top-notch as always RedHat technologies has been.It's not about the product or their documentation I am talking about it was the approach they have taken which i am questioning.

My suggestions,

For the all in one solution I just asking them to deliver an option which someone can quicky deploy and use it out of the box.(not for production but for dev and experimenting) this option have already in :

* redhat openshift -- minishift 3.11 --- codeready container 4.5
* redhat openstack -- packstack
* redhat sattalite 6/7 -- ?

As you can see all these projects are based on pluggable architecture.

2." lack of composite proper documentation"

This is a thing I saw in RedHat opensource projects even in earlier days.What I mean by this is creating a hub that they can integrate all their opensource projects at one place with documentation with related to their commercial products.And if the product using few opensource projects like the satellite 6 then structure them accordingly as single documentation rather than scatter around few domains.( composite).If you see their commercial docs you will understand.I am suggesting them to do the same thing here that's all.It will be easy to understand and easy to maintain and give someone a proper understanding of redhat effort for opensource.I see in this GitHub web site they have to try to do that but not properly executed.

https://redhatofficial.github.io/#!/main

So those are my suggestions for redhat to improve in their opensource version of satellite 6.I will select this as the answer for the question I have ask before.(it was a suggestion rather than a question).Feel free to anyone to continue this discussion,and thank you for sharing your ideas and experience. Cheers.....