Greetings everyone,

During this week's PTG, we discussed networking aspects and the challenges we've encountered getting everyone on the same page.

Ultimately, our biggest challenge is competing needs *and* requirements. The best way to describe the challenge is as a giant venn diagram where some interests overlap such that there are logical relationships and paths forward which can be drawn. But then there are also broadly useful themes to discuss, and requirements visit which then can also cloud the discussion. At the end of the day, the challenge is not to boil the ocean, but to focus on the distinct cases while also maybe draw the appropriate boundaries to defer specific items or have the necessary plan or idea of a plan in our back pocket before proceeding forward.

So we tried bucketing in the form of hands raised during the PTG[0] to begin to give us some initial data points in an unscientific model of +1s.

• Standalone operators who need non-neutron networking (mvp: tag/untag pots): +6
• Neutron Integrated Operators who are just using switches and need better existing ML2 plugin support: +3
• 3rd party SDN integration (w/neutron): +2
• Ironic additional capabilities at the front-end (dynamic portgroup assembly/weightable scheduling of specific ports): +7

If you have specific interest in any of these buckets, please reach out to Ironic contributors by replying to this mailing list post, messaging us on IRC, or even leaving some additional comments on our etherpad[0] from the PTG.

That being said, the challenge is sort of how to get started and begin to make velocity.

Consensus at the PTG was to sort of take a "two specific focus areas" approach and allow sub-teams to self organize. The key aspect is to get both subteams to talk to each other on a regular basis to ensure there is any coss-collaboration, reviews, and other overall awareness is highlighted for the purposes of collaboration. Discussion has also yielded that there is some consensus in trying to keep that sync as a higher bandwidth video call.

Thoughts?

- The Ironic Team


[0]: https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/ironic-ptg-april-2025