Echoing and enhancing what Alvaro said, kolla-ansible has great docs on deploying Bifrost+Ironic: https://docs.openstack.org/kolla-ansible/latest/reference/deployment-and-bootstrapping/bifrost.html.

I don't know what you class as "complex YAML or JSON"; bifrost does require an inventory file with BMC information and credentials at a minimum.

Bifrost is kinda a hidden gem in OpenStack; give it a shot. If there's a specific reason it doesn't fit your use case, or you encounter a problem if you choose to try it, please close the loop and let us know!

Thanks! Good luck with your project.

Jay Faulkner

Ironic PTL

OpenStack TC Member

On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 4:08 PM Frank Smith <fsmith@techwiki.info> wrote:

Hey all, quick question:

Previously I would use Fuel to deploy Openstack. It was a good tool, as it built a deployment server where I would see new, un-provisioned servers show up in the list, and I could choose the roles, including stacking roles, onto the servers and then provision the whole cluster. There were no complex yaml or JSON files to deal with and it would retry the deployment on an error state. When done, I had a nice OpenStack cluster, a Ceph backend, and life was good.

Now it seems Fuel has been retired. What is comparable to the abilities of Fuel today? What are people using for such deployments now? I get that devstack, microstack and packstack are great for all-in-one installs, but Fuel was great for deploying a whole rack of servers from bare metal. I am not asking for any free training here, but instead asking for info on a similar product, if there is one, so I can learn that and be OpenStack productive once more.

Thank you for any help,
--Francis Smith