Open Stack

Hey all,

As indicated before the summit, the Ironic PTG was dedicated to in-person
collaboration, hacking, and design chats but were not intended for any
final decision making due to not all of our community being present.

Full, contemporaneous notes taken are at
https://etherpad.opendev.org/p/ironic-openinfra-2023 -- this is meant to be
a high level summary.

For the summit, there were several extremely well-attended Ironic talks.
Thank you to all of those who gave talks! In addition, I, and other members
of the Ironic community, were able to connect with many people using Ironic
quietly in production with a large amount of success. As always, the Ironic
community strongly encourages people with success stories to loudly
communicate about them :D.

Ironic did have a single forum session, where we met with several
operators, answering questions and in some places providing solutions to
people struggling with a problem. The full notes from the session,
primarily consisting of a census of Ironic installs, are accessible from
the above linked etherpad.

As for the PTG sessions, there were a few topics. These are extremely rough
outlines of what was discussed; but again, no specific decisions were made.
- networking-generic-switch
-- Several contributors, including Baptise Jonglez and John Garbutt,
discussed options for scaling NGS further up in the future, including
enhancing it to support other protocols, such as VXLAN. Some of these
discussions have already moved to the list; and I encourage folks to engage
with Baptise to make our network tooling scale even more.

- Future of Ironic
-- We spoke for a while about the Ironic vision document created in Rocky,
targeting approximately now:
https://docs.openstack.org/ironic/latest/contributor/vision.html -- we've
accomplished many of the items on the list, but what's next?
-- Possibilities brainstormed included:
--- Enhanced network interfaces that use SDN or DPU orchestration to
configure baremetal networks
--- more distinct support for composible hardware
--- expanding Ironic standalone use cases
--- getting more directly connected with communities like Metal3
integrating into Ironic
--- scaling down Ironic into a tool useful at smaller scale (that a tool
like cobbler has a strong hold on today)
--- terraform driver designed to call Ironic directly
-- I think we should update the vision document with some of these ideas so
we can use it as a measuring stick in 5-6 years, like we were able to use
the Rocky vision document this time.

Finally, we closed up the summit with an Ironic dinner, with 16 attendees
from various companies, use cases, and backgrounds with one thing in
common: we all need bare metal servers :). If you're wondering who the
faces of Ironic are, here are some of us
https://twitter.com/jayofdoom/status/1669531671937384449 :).

I'll say, on a personal note, it was extremely nice to get to see many of
my old and new friends in the OpenInfra community face to face for the
first time in years. The absence of those unable to travel was felt deeply
as well, and I hope we'll be able to reconnect in person in the future.

Thanks,
Jay Faulkner
Ironic PTL
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