Open Stack

Hi all!

With the driver composition implemented in Ocata and polished in Pike, we would 
like to eventually get rid of the old-style drivers. I believe the new hardware 
types are much easier to understand, create and use.

We have landed a spec laying down the deprecation plan [1]. In essence, we don't 
do anything in Pike yet. Then in Queens we will require all drivers that are 
going to be supported to have a hardware type counterpart. We will deprecate the 
classic driver loading mechanism in that release. Finally, in Rocky we will 
remove the ability to load classic drivers, as well as all classic drivers we 
have in tree.

This may have effect on vendor drivers, as well as on 3rdparty CI. We tried to 
minimize the latter by NOT requiring double CI coverage at any point in time. 
Please read the spec [1] and let us know your questions and concerns.

Operators, currently using classic drivers (which, I guess, is the majority), 
should keep an eye on the new drivers appearing in the release notes, and plan 
an eventual migration to them. We will provide a detailed upgrade guide soon.

Thanks!

[1] 
http://specs.openstack.org/openstack/ironic-specs/specs/approved/classic-drivers-future.html