Hi,
There was a one hour discussion with Julia from Ironic with the Edge Computing Group [1]. In this mail I try to conclude what was discussed and ask some clarification questions.
Current Ironic uses DHCP for hardware provisioning, therefore it requires DHCP relay enabled on the whole path to the edge cloud instances. There are two alternatives to solve this: 1) Virtual media support [2] where the ip configuration is embedded into a virtual image what is booted via the board management interface 2) Redfish support, however the state and support of redfish for host management is not clear. Is there already a specification has been added for redfish support?
Upgrade of edge cloud infrastructures: - Firmware upgrade should be supported by Ironic. Is this something on its way or is this a new need? - Operating system and infra update can be solved using Fenix [3], however handling several edge cloud instances from a central location needs new features.
Handling of failed servers: - A monitoring system or the operator should provide the input to mark a server as failed - Ironic can power down the failed servers and have the definition of a maintenance state - Discussed in [4]
Additional ideas what we half discussed: - Running Ironic containers in a switch with the images hosted by Swift somewhere else. Are there any concerns about this idea? Any missing features from somewhere?
[1]: https://etherpad.openstack.org/p/edge-wg-ptg-preparation-denver-2019 [2]: https://specs.openstack.org/openstack/ironic-specs/specs/not-implemented/L3-... [3]: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Fenix [4]: http://lists.openstack.org/pipermail/edge-computing/2019-May/000582.html
Br, Gerg0