Open Stack

On 10/21/2014 02:11 AM, Devananda van der Veen wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I was reminded in the Ironic meeting today that the words "hardware
> discovery" are overloaded and used in different ways by different
> people. Since this is something we are going to talk about at the
> summit (again), I'd like to start the discussion by building consensus
> in the language that we're going to use.
>
> So, I'm starting this thread to explain how I use those two words, and
> some other words that I use to mean something else which is what some
> people mean when they use those words. I'm not saying my words are the
> right words -- they're just the words that make sense to my brain
> right now. If someone else has better words, and those words also make
> sense (or make more sense) then I'm happy to use those instead.
>
> So, here are rough definitions for the terms I've been using for the
> last six months to disambiguate this:
>
> "hardware discovery"
> The process or act of identifying hitherto unknown hardware, which is
> addressable by the management system, in order to later make it
> available for provisioning and management.
>
> "hardware introspection"
> The process or act of gathering information about the properties or
> capabilities of hardware already known by the management system.
I generally agree with this separation, though it brings some troubles 
to me, as I'm used to calling "discovery" what you called 
"introspection" (it was not the case this summer, but now I changed my 
mind). And the term "discovery" is baked into the.. hmm.. introspection 
service that I've written [1].

So I would personally prefer to leave "discovery" as in "discovery of 
hardware properties", though I realize that "introspection" may be a 
better name.

[1] https://github.com/Divius/ironic-discoverd
>
>
> Why is this disambiguation important? At the last midcycle, we agreed
> that "hardware discovery" is out of scope for Ironic -- finding new,
> unmanaged nodes and enrolling them with Ironic is best left to other
> services or processes, at least for the forseeable future.
>
> However, "introspection" is definitely within scope for Ironic. Even
> though we couldn't agree on the details during Juno, we are going to
> revisit this at the Kilo summit. This is an important feature for many
> of our current users, and multiple proof of concept implementations of
> this have been done by different parties over the last year.
>
> It may be entirely possible that no one else in our developer
> community is using the term "introspection" in the way that I've
> defined it above -- if so, that's fine, I can stop calling that
> "introspection", but I don't know a better word for the thing that is
> find-unknown-hardware.
>
> Suggestions welcome,
> Devananda
>
>
> P.S.
>
> For what it's worth, googling for "hardware discovery" yields several
> results related to identifying unknown network-connected devices and
> adding them to inventory systems, which is the way that I'm using the
> term right now, so I don't feel completely off in continuing to say
> "discovery" when I mean "find unknown network devices and add them to
> Ironic".
>
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