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Would Blazar provide much of this functionality? I think it only talks Nova at the moment.

It doesn't quite cover the use case but one approach we have taken is to define resources which expire after a length of time. Details are in https://techblog.web.cern.ch/techblog/post/expiry-of-vms-in-cern-cloud/ and the Mistral workflows are at https://gitlab.cern.ch/cloud-infrastructure/mistral-workflows.

Tim

-----Original Message-----
From: Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars at redhat.com>
Date: Wednesday, 30 January 2019 at 16:28
To: "openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org" <openstack-discuss at lists.openstack.org>
Cc: Tzu-Mainn Chen <tzumainn at redhat.com>, "Ansari, Mohhamad Naved" <naved001 at bu.edu>, Kristi Nikolla <knikolla at bu.edu>, Julia Kreger <jkreger at redhat.com>, Ian Ballou <iballou at redhat.com>
Subject: [ironic] Hardware leasing with Ironic

    Howdy.
    
    I'm working with a group of people who are interested in enabling some
    form of baremetal leasing/reservations using Ironic.  There are three
    key features we're looking for that aren't (maybe?) available right
    now:
    
    - multi-tenancy: in addition to the ironic administrator, we need to
      be able to define a node "owner" (someone who controls a specific
      node) and a node "consumer" (someone who has been granted temporary
      access to a specific node).  An "owner" always has the ability to
      control node power or access the console, can mark a node as
      available or not, and can set lease policies (such as a maximum
      lease lifetime) for a node.  A "consumer" is granted access to power
      control and console only when they hold an active lease, and
      otherwise has no control over the node.
    
    - leasing: a mechanism for marking nodes as available, requesting
      nodes for a specific length of time, and returning those nodes to
      the available pool when a lease has expired.
    
    - hardware only: we'd like the ability to leave os provisioning up to
      the "consumer".  For example, after someone acquires a node via the
      leasing mechanism, they can use Foreman to provisioning an os onto
      the node.
    
    For example, a workflow might look something like this:
    
    - The owner of a baremetal node makes the node part of a pool of
      available hardware. They set a maximum lease lifetime of 5 days.
    
    - A consumer issues a lease request for "3 nodes with >= 48GB of
      memory and >= 1 GPU" and "1 node with >= 16GB of memory and >= 1TB
      of local disk", with a required lease time of 3 days.
    
    - The leasing system finds available nodes matching the hardware
      requirements and with owner-set lease policies matching the lease
      lifetime requirements.
    
    - The baremetal nodes are assigned to the consumer, who can then
      attach them to networks and make use of their own provisioning tools
      (which may be another Ironic instance?) to manage the hardware. The
      consumer is able to control power on these nodes and access the
      serial console.
      
    - At the end of the lease, the nodes are wiped and returned to the
      pool of available hardware. The previous consumer no longer has any
      access to the nodes.
    
    Our initial thought is to implement this as a service that sits in
    front of Ironic and provides the multi-tenancy and policy logic, while
    using Ironic to actually control the hardware.
    
    Does this seem like a reasonable path forward? On paper there's a lot
    of overlap here between what we want and features provided by things
    like the Nova schedulers or the Placement api, but it's not clear
    we can leverage those at the baremetal layer.
    
    Thanks for your thoughts,
    
    -- 
    Lars Kellogg-Stedman <lars at redhat.com> | larsks @ {irc,twitter,github}
    http://blog.oddbit.com/                |