Hi all, We're ecstatic to announce the release of ironic-python-agent 1.0.0. This is the first ever release of this project, and is the basis for a stable/liberty branch. We will continue to do intermediary releases and stable branches for IPA, following Ironic's release model. IPA is the heart of Ironic's deploy ramdisk. It was brought to the project during the Icehouse cycle[0] as an alternate deploy mechanism to the existing bash ramdisk. Since then, it has evolved to support every Ironic driver and also provide a pluggable cleaning mechanism. It is now the recommended ramdisk for Ironic deployments, and soon the only ramdisk, as the bash ramdisk is now deprecated. IPA is a python application that exposes a REST API for performing actions on the server it is running on. It has a heartbeat mechanism, adding two-way communication with Ironic. IPA allows for pluggable "hardware managers"; by default it supports a wide variety of hardware in a generic way, and additional hardware managers can be added to expose support or optimization for specialized hardware. For example, one might add a hardware manager to make disk erasure use a vendor-specific binary, rather than shred or hdparm's secure erase. Instructions for including ironic-python-agent in a ramdisk, and links to pre-built ramdisks from the master branch, are available at: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic-python-agent/#image-builders Instructions for setting up Ironic to use a given ramdisk are here: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic/deploy/install-guide.html#image-r... Please do try this out! For more information, see the links below. Source code: http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/ironic-python-agent Documentation: http://docs.openstack.org/developer/ironic-python-agent/ PyPI package: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/ironic-python-agent/1.0.0 Bug tracker: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ironic-python-agent // jim [0] http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/openstack-dev/2014-March/029270.html