[et-mgmt-tools] Care to comment on the future of "Spacewalk" and cobbler?

[Michael DeHaan]

Marc Mondragon wrote:
>
> Just saw the announcement and was wondering what was in store for 
> cobbler …
>
> Marc Mondragon
>
> Fox River Financial Resources
>
> 2100 Enterprise Avenue
> Geneva, IL 60134
> marcmo at foxriver.com <mailto:marcmo at foxriver.com>
>

Sure :)

Hotel internet has been slow, so apologies on being invisible over the 
last few days on the lists/IRC.

Random note: You can see the Register picked up the Cobbler talk here... 
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/19/red_hat_summit_2008_cobbler/

They are correct in saying that what we're doing with Cobbler, the 
libvirt tools, Func, and so forth were a major factor in making the 
decision to open source Satellite. This community *works*. Getting 
Satellite out there is clearly something we all wanted to do for a long 
time, and now that it's done, we're /really/ happy to see the excitement 
growing around it. We've shown we can build a sizable community around 
developers and admins who want to share and participate in developing 
common infrastructure. We've shown that the open development models 
started in Fedora are extremely applicable in the enterprise space (see 
also EPEL). With Spacewalk, this can grow further. Spacewalk is 
essentially going to be an aggregrator of all sorts of great OSS 
management projects in Fedora/EPEL -- we want it to become an interface 
to make all of these more usable together. Step 1 is Cobbler, Step 2 
might be config management, it might be something else ... we're still 
exploring.

I was sitting around at FudCON today with lots of folks, many Satellite 
users, some not, discussing the future of the project. There's a ton of 
interest here and it's going to be a good thing. There's already folks 
interested in diving in there and helping with database support, for 
instance. People on IRC are already looking at the code and talking 
about sending in patches. Very good stuff.

Cobbler inclusion in Satellite/Spacewalk is definitely in the roadmap, 
and as I mentioned in my talk (slides up now -- 
https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/PresentationStorage ) we're 
shooting for early 2009 for having that there. If you want support for 
Cobbler you'll be able to get that (AFAIK) through purchasing Satellite. 
In addition, the Satellite GUI's provisioning options, since they will 
be all Cobbler powered, will work to control cobbler -- so you'll have 
additional GUI options. Cobbler command line programs will still work as 
normal in this case too, as will koan. Also if you're an existing 
Satellite user we want the upgrade process to be transparent. I suspect 
we won't surface every Cobbler knob and fader in the Spacewalk GUI, 
though you'll still be able to manipulate cobbler directly in those 
cases. As myself and the Sat folks have to do some more planning, this 
is somewhat subject to change. I'll start a thread up on spacewalk-devel 
shortly. If you're interested, definitely join the mailing lists 
mentioned at fedorahosted.org/spacewalk and #spacewalk on freenode. 
Development/planning is going to happen in the open there just like it 
does here, so if there's something you'd like to see in Spacewalk, 
please weigh in!

So, what about stand alone Cobbler? Cobbler as a project will be 
continuing on as usual and continuing it's quest for dominance :) You 
won't need to install Spacewalk to use it, as there are other 
applications (ovirt, possibly test tools, etc) that will want to have a 
provisioning service component -- Cobbler is going to be that component. 
Does it go away? No. Does it become harder to use? No. More 
dependencies? Also no :) It's all good!

I suspect there will be a few Cobbler RFE's and changes needed to make 
Satellite support work (maybe a few more XMLRPC methods?), but I don't 
see any major roadmap changes.

 From Summit conversations so far there seems to be a lot of interest in 
image management and the power stuff (we may spawn a seperate 
FedoraHosted project for the power bits), so that's definitely on my 
shortlist. And that means Satellite/Spacewalk can then acquire those 
features too.

--Michael