Open Stack

Hi all!

Short version: if you have operational knowledge setting up Ironic
(either the Icehouse release or current trunk), you can help out a lot
right now by sharing that knowledge.

Long version...

I've seen an influx of folks interested in deploying Ironic over the
past few months, which is fantastic and awesome and also somewhat
scary -- there are clearly people using Ironic who are not also part
of its developer community! It has also become increasingly apparent
that, while our developer docs are good (or at least "good enough"),
our operational docs leave a lot to be desired. Some folks even went
back to the old Nova Baremetal wiki, which is a terrible thing because
most of what that says is almost similar to Ironic but wrong. (I have
updated that to have more bold text about its deprecated status, and
will archive the page once that driver is actually removed from Nova.)

During the Icehouse cycle, the core review team waited until close to
the release to write docs. While we were focused on developer docs, we
also put together some operational docs (kudos to the folks who
contributed!). That process worked well since it was our first
release, and as developers, it's easy for us to iterate on the
developer docs. However, hindsight being what it is, I don't think we
knew enough about what users and operators would need, and now I think
we will be doing our community a disservice if we don't provide more
operator-focused docs soon.

The areas where I'm currently seeing a lot of questions from operators are:

- building the deploy kernel & ramdisk pair // configuring ironic to use them
- how to enroll nodes // what information needs to be supplied
- relationship between ironic and nova scheduler (flavors, capabilities, etc)
- example/suggested neutron configuration for provisioning physical machines
- recommended deployment topology and rationale (service co-location
or isolation)
- how to run the nova.virt.ironic driver alongside a traditional
hypervisor driver

A lot of this is done by the automation tooling we use every day
(devstack and tripleo). However, neither of these are a replacement
for a human-readable set of instructions to help a smart person figure
out what they're supposed to do, especially if they just want to start
using Ironic with their existing OpenStack deployment.

So -- if you're runnig Ironic (outside of devstack or tripleo) or are
in the process of figuring that out (and maybe already asking
questions in IRC), please consider proposing something to the in-tree
doc pages, found here:

http://git.openstack.org/cgit/openstack/ironic/tree/doc/source/deploy


Thanks in advance,
Devananda