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I'm also very interested in the use case here, for accelerators deployed at
edge it would be needed to have zero touch provision capability as Jay
described.

I'm wondering if the open firmware project [0] could be of help here by any
means ? I saw there was a FB presentation that they use it for provisioning
automation in their datacenter at the OCP Regional Summit.

[0] https://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Open_System_Firmware

On Thu, Dec 20, 2018 at 9:09 PM Jay Pipes <jaypipes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 12/20/2018 07:12 AM, Curtis wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I've been looking through the docs I can find related to the edge
> > working group, and I'm wondering if there has been any
> > discussion/documentation of a Zero Touch Provisioning use case. I can't
> > seem to find anything, but I may not be looking in the right place. Just
> > wanted to double check and see what the current state is, if any.
>
> I take it that by "zero touch *provisioning*" (emphasis added to
> differentiate from zero *configuration* networking, you are referring to
> the ability for a new server to be rack-and-stacked in a site, powered
> on, and immediately register itself with either a local inventory
> management system or a remote one?
>
> In either case, the issue I foresee is that the firmware (or initial
> boot/ramdisk that comes from the factory or supply chain team) will need
> to have some program installed in it that sends out a request looking
> for some known/assumed inventory management service [1]. The thing that
> *responds* to such a request would, of course, need to be already
> installed and available either on a switch or a pre-installed machine
> pingable on the out-of-band network and already configured by the team
> that handles hardware inventory.
>
> I can see some vendors working on their own custom low-touch
> provisioning software -- and this software would likely end up depending
> on their own proprietary (or subscription-based) server software ala Red
> Hat's Satellite software [2]). But getting all the vendors to come
> together on a unified low-touch provisioning system? Chances are pretty
> slim, IMHO.
>
> Still, it's an interesting problem domain and I'd be interested in
> sharing thoughts and discussing it with others. Here at
> "Yahoo!/Oath/Verizon Media Group/Whatever we'll be called next month" we
> have custom software (and a bit of custom hardware!) that handles base
> hardware provisioning and I'm definitely interested in seeing if other
> shops that handle hundreds of thousands of baremetal machines are
> looking to collaborate in this area ("edge" or otherwise!).
>
> Best,
> -jay
>
> [1] this could be done via some custom DHCPDISCOVER/DHCPREQUEST bits I
> suppose -- which would require a DHCP client in the firmware/bootdisk --
> but more likely would depend on the IPMI/BMC system in use for the
> hardware. As soon as IPMI/BMC comes into play, the extreme differences
> in OEM vendor support will rule out a generic workable solution here as
> many in the Ironic community will likely attest to [3]. If you can rely
> on a homogeneous set of hardware at edge sites, you might be able to put
> something together that just suits your company's need, however.
>
> [2] https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/satellite
>
> [3] https://github.com/openstack/ironic/tree/master/ironic/drivers
>
>

-- 
Zhipeng (Howard) Huang

Principle Engineer
IT Standard & Patent/IT Product Line
Huawei Technologies Co,. Ltd
Email: huangzhipeng at huawei.com
Office: Huawei Industrial Base, Longgang, Shenzhen
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