[Video] Introduction to IPA-builder
In this bare metal SIG video I'm explaining why ironic-python-agent-builder was created, how to use it and how to cusomise the resulting images.
Ironic Wallaby Meetup - Russian Edition
We've had a very successful meetup about Ironic in Russian. This post is a short summary of what we discussed and what I learned.
If you understand Russian and have 3 hours of free time, you can just follow the recording:
The slides (also in Russian) are here: https://owlet.today/talks/ironic-wallaby-ru/
Easy HTTP requests with OpenStackSDK
This short note explains how to use OpenStackSDK to make raw HTTP queries against OpenStack services (including Ironic) in an easy and convenient way. It is very handy when testing new API features or trying to understand how API works.
Injecting files in Ironic
This post is a follow-up to the earlier deploy steps tutorial, where I showed how to create a deploy step for injecting arbitrary files. I promised to bring that that particular deploy step upstream, and I've delivered on that promise!
Note
This post is talking about a recently (Feb 22, 2021) merged feature. If you don't have a master deployment, you may need to wait until the Wallaby release.
Deploy Steps Tutorial
In this tutorial I'm showing how to create a custom deploy step for Ironic, how to build a ramdisk with in and how to use it when deploying a node.
Deploy steps are an answer to question "how do I run non-standard actions during deployment". Out-of-band steps run from your control plane and can talk to the BMC. More interesting for us are in-band steps that run from within the machine and offer nearly infinite opportunity for customization.
Today we'll create a solution for the following story:
As an operator, I would like to inject small files into the root partition of the final instance through the bare metal API.
There are, of course, numerous way of implementing it, cloud-init being probably the most popular. But we will concentrate on using a deploy step. The complete source code for this tutorial can be found here: https://github.com/dtantsur/ironic-inject-files/
On fear, violence and Russia
I am (slightly) sorry for interrupting technical posts with politics, but, as all responsible adults know, even when you're not interested in politics, politics may get interested in you (insert your favorite "In Soviet Russia" joke).
Ephemeral Workloads with Ironic
In this post I'm presenting the ramdisk deploy interface, explaining how to use it to run ephemeral workloads and how to provide configuration data for them.
Ironic has been actively explored by the scientific community as a way to automate running calculations without incurring the costs of virtualization. This sort of workloads does not necessarily require installing anything on the machine's hard drive, which may instead be used for caching, swap or not used at all. The results are posted back via HTTP(s) or stored on a network share.
Ironic Node Multi-Tenancy
Note
This is a guest post from Tzu-Mainn Chen, Principal Software Engineer from Red Hat, who is working on the Elastic Secure Infrastructure initiative.
Ironic node muti-tenancy is a relatively new feature in Ironic. What is it and how can it be used?
My Development Toolbox
A recent discussion on Twitter has prompted me to write about the toolset I'm using during development, covering both work-related and personal projects. I will not just provide names and links, but also explain how exactly I use every tool.
MiniScript and Future of Introspection Rules
Today I'm presenting the miniscript project and discussion the future of the ironic-inspector feature called introspection rules. If the ironic business is of no interest for you, scroll right to Enter MiniScript and stop there.