Open Stack

Hi!

On 6/21/23 18:25, Jay Faulkner wrote:
> 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 
> <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 
> <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

I can haz standalone switch management? :)

> --- 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)

Not clear from the etherpad: is it a question of scale or UX? I'm not 
sure a Bifrost installation is much larger than MaaS, etc (although we 
can always optimize it further, e.g. add sqlite as an option).

The etherpad mentions "Easy enough", and ease of use is definitely the 
field where we Ironic leaves a lot to be desired. Possibilities that 
come to mind:
1) My "deployment API" proposal,
2) Adding a strict schema to our API and clean up confusing JSON fields,
3) An image building service,
4) The already mentioned network management,
5) More high-level API actions/workflows.

> --- terraform driver designed to call Ironic directly

We have something like this, admittedly, limited to our case: 
https://github.com/openshift-metal3/terraform-provider-ironic/

Dmitry

> -- 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 
> <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