Peter McGowan - Mastering CloudForms Automation: An Essential Guide for Cloud Administrators

by Peter McGowan

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978-1-4919-5722-6

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Red Hat CloudForms is a powerful cloud management platform that allows us to efficiently manage our virtual infrastructure and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) clouds. Part of this efficient management involves automating many of the day-to-day tasks that would otherwise require manual involvement, or time-consuming and possibly error-prone repetitive steps.

This book is an introduction and how-to guide to working with the Automate feature of Red Hat CloudForms.

CloudForms Automate simplifies our lives and increases our operational efficiency. It allows us to do such things as:

• Eliminate many of the manual decisions and operations involved in provisioning virtual machines and cloud instances.

• Load-balance our virtual machines across our virtual infrastructure to match our organizations way of working, be it logical (e.g., cost center, department), operational (e.g., infrastructure lifecycle environment), or categorical (e.g., server role or virtual machine characteristic).

• Create service catalogs to allow our users to provision virtual machines from a single Order button.

• Create autoscalable cloud applications in which new virtual machines are dynamically provisioned on demand.

• Manage our complete virtual machine lifecycle.

• Integrate our virtual machine provisioning workflow with the wider enterprisefor example, automatically registering new virtual machines with a Red Hat Satellite server.

• Implement intelligent virtual machine retirement workflows that de-allocate resources such as IP addresses and unregister from directory services.