Open Stack

On Wed, 2019-01-30 at 16:17 +0000, Sean Mooney wrote:
> On Wed, 2019-01-30 at 10:26 -0500, Lars Kellogg-Stedman wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> have you looked at blazar
> https://docs.openstack.org/blazar/queens/index.html
> it is basically desigedn to do this.
> > 
> > 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,
> > 
> 
>