Standardization and Management at Scale | Up and Running with Red Hat Satellite 04

This is the finale of the miniseries, and it’s the episode where Satellite stops looking like a patching tool and starts looking like a Swiss army knife. Richard Rios and I apply configuration at scale with Ansible system roles, lean on host groups to define what systems should look like, and talk through OpenSCAP compliance, provisioning, and the broader idea of standardizing your infrastructure. As always, we’re doing it live, which means a few honest stumbles along the way.

A few things worth carrying away from this one:

• System roles turn a firewall change into a fleet change. I demo pushing a RHEL firewall system role to production and dev host groups at once, and it’s a small example that scales to thousands of servers and thousands of ports.
• Stop maintaining stale templates. Kickstart files and VM templates always drift out of date. I make the case for building a vanilla image and letting Satellite and host groups do the configuring, so your systems come out identical every time.
• Satellite is more than patching. OpenSCAP scans, PXE provisioning, insights integration, even air-gapped content over a USB drive on a cruise ship. Richard’s use cases are a great reminder of how much this tool actually does.

Thanks for riding along through the whole series. Satellite will keep coming up on the channel, so subscribe and keep an eye out for what’s next.