Monday the patch for the creation of the Baremetal-SIG was approved by the TC and UC [1]. It's exciting to see the level of interest we've already seen in the planning etherpad [2], and it's time to start kicking off our first initiatives.
I'd like to begin by addressing some of the comments in the patch.
* Wiki vs Etherpad. My own personal preference is to start with the Etherpad as we get our feet underneath us. As more artifacts and begin to materialize, I think a Wiki would be an excellent location for hosting the information. My primary concern with Wikis is their tendency (from my point of view) to become out of date with the goals of a group. So, to begin with, unless there are any strong objections, we can do initial planning on the Etherpad and graduate to more permanent and resilient landing pages later.
* Addressing operational aspects of Ironic. I see this as an absolutely critical aspect of the SIG. We already have organization devoted mostly to development, the Ironic team itself. SIGs are meant to be a collaborative effort between developers, operators, and users. We can send a patch up to clarify that in the governance document. If you are an operator, please use this [baremetal-sig] subject heading to start discussions and organize shared experiences and documentation.
* The SIG is focused on all aspects of running bare-metal and Ironic, whether it be as a driver to Nova, a stand-alone service, or built into another project as a component. One of the amazing things about Ironic is its flexibility and versatility. We want to highlight that there's more than one way to do things with Ironic.
* Chairs. I would very much like for this to be a community experience, and welcome nominations for co-chairs. I've found in the past that 2-3 co-chairs makes for a good balance, and given the number of people who have expressed interest in the SIG in general I think we should go ahead and appoint two extra people to co-lead the SIG. If this interests you, please self-nominate here and we can use lazy consensus to round out the rest of the leadership. If we have several people step up, we can consider a stronger form of voting using the systems available to us.
First goals:
I think that an important first goal is in the publication of a whitepaper outlining the motivation, deployment methods, and case studies surrounding OpenStack bare metal, similar to what we did with the containers whitepaper last year. A goal would be to publish at the Denver Open Infrastructure summit. Some initial thoughts and rough schedule can be found here [3], and also linked from the planning etherpad.
One of the nice things about working on the whitepaper is we can also generate a bunch of other expanded content based on that work. In particular, I'd very much like to highlight deployment scenarios and case studies. I'm thinking of the whitepaper as a seed from which multiple authors demonstrate their experience and expertise to the benefit of the entire community.
Another goal we've talked about at the Foundation is the creation of a new bare metal logo program. Distinct from something like the OpenStack Powered Trademark, which focuses on interoperability between OpenStack products with an emphasis on interoperability, this program would be devoted to highlighting products that are shipping with Ironic as a key component of their bare metal management strategy. This could be in many different configurations, and is focused on the shipping of code that solves particular problems, whether Ironic is user-facing or not. We're very much in the planning stages of a program like this, and it's important to get community feedback early on about if you would find it useful and what features you would like to see a program like this have. A few items that we're very interested in getting early feedback on are:
* The Pixie Boots mascot has been an important part of the Ironic project, and we would like to apply it to highlight Ironic usage within the logo program. * If you're a public cloud, sell a distribution, provide installation services, or otherwise have some product that uses Ironic, what is your interest in participating in a logo program? * In addition to the logo, would you find collaboration to build content on how Ironic is being used in projects and products in our ecosystem useful?
Finally, we have the goals of producing and highlighting content for using and operating Ironic. A list of possible use-cases is included in the SIG etherpad. We're also thinking about setting up a demo booth with a small set of server hardware to demonstrate Ironic at the Open Infrastructure summit.
On all of those items, your feedback and collaboration is essential. Please respond to this mailing list if you have thoughts or want to volunteer for any of these items, and also contribute to the etherpad to help organize efforts and add any resources you might have available. Thanks to everyone, and I'll be following up soon with more information and updates.
-Chris
[1] https://review.openstack.org/#/c/634824/ [2] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/bare-metal-sig [3] https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/bare-metal-whitepaper