# Foreman Origin Story, with Ohad Levy

In September of 2009, Ohad Levy, and others, [released](https://github.com/theforeman/foreman/releases/tag/0.1) the first version of [Foreman](https://theforeman.org/). Coming initially out of the Puppet community, Foreman was lifecycle management tool for deploying large scale infrastructures, on physical and virtual servers.

The community grew rapidly, building on the success of Puppet itself, and riding the wave of early cloud computing, and the complex issues of deploying, and managing, cloud instances.

Foreman gives you numerous ways to visualize your infrastructure, measure usage, and automate management. Previously work-intensive tasks can be handled based in consistent and reliable ways, and you'll have deep insight into what's going on in your data center.

When Ohad started working at Red Hat, he had the opportunity to bring Foreman in as an upstream of the [Red Hat Satellite](https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite) product, which helps customers manage their production Red Hat Enterprise Linux installations.

Ohad stayed involved as project lead for many years, but eventually his career moved in different directions, and he, in turn, passed project leadership to others who had achieved the trust of the community. Ohad recognized that he couldn't scale to the rapid growth of the community, and delegating, and ultimately relinquishing, leadership of the project, was what the user community needed.

While letting go of something you've built can be very difficult, Ohad observes that "trusting people and letting others fail, I think, is crucial, because otherwise they will be afraid, and not take a leadership role."

You can watch the full interview at ____

*(Video will be on the Red Hat Community YouTube channel. Final edit is [here](https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/1bYOA3pJJKaZ71GDyPOQEyO6kmf9dOrfQ).*