Atlanta PTG Summary: Ironic (part 1)

Boot-from-volume

Got some progress, most of the Ironic patches are up. Desperately needs review and testing, though. The Nova part is also lagging behind, and should be brought to the Nova team attention.

Actions

mgoddard and dtantsur volunteered to help with testing, while mjturek, hsiina and crushil volunteered to do some coding.

Goals for Pike

finish the first (iSCSI using iPXE) case and the Nova part.

Networking

A lot of progress here during Ocata, completed bonding and attach/detach API.

VLAN-aware instances should work. However, it requires an expensive ToR switch, supporting VLAN/VLAN and VLAN/VXLAN rewriting, and, of course ML2 plugin support. Also, reusing an existing segmentation ID requires more work: we have no current way to put the right ID in the configdrive.

Actions

vsaienko, armando and kevinbenton are looking into the Neutron part of the configdrive problem.

Routed networks support require Ironic to be aware of which physical network(s) each node is connected to.

Goals for Pike

• model physical networks on Ironic ports,

• update VIF attach logic to no longer attach things to wrong physnets.

We discussed introducing notifications from Neutron to Ironic about events of interest for us. We are going to use the same model as between Neutron and Nova: create a Neutron plugin that filters out interesting events and posts to a new Ironic API endpoint.

Goals for Pike

have this notification system in place.

Finally, we agreed that we need to work on a reference architecture document, describing the best practices of deploying Ironic, especially around multi-tenant networking setup.

Actions

jroll to kickstart this document, JayF and mariojv to help.

Rolling upgrades

Missed Ocata by a small margin. The code is up and needs reviewing. The CI is waiting for the multinode job to start working (should be close as well).

Goals for Pike

rolling upgrade Ocata -> Pike.

Driver composition reform

Most of the code landed in Ocata already. Some client changes landed in Pike, some are still on review. As we released Ocata with the driver composition changes being experimental, we are not ready to deprecate old-style drivers in Pike. Documentation is also still lacking.

Goals for Pike

• make new-style dynamic drivers the recommend way of writing and using drivers,

• fill in missing documentation,

• recommend vendors to have hardware types for their hardware, as well as 3rdparty CI support for it.

Important decisions

• no new classic drivers are accepted in-tree (please check when accepting specifications),

• no new interfaces additions for classic drivers(volume_interface is the last accepted from them),

• remove the SSH drivers by Pike final (probably around M3).

Ironic Inspector HA

Preliminary work (switch to a real state machine) done in Ocata. Splitting the service into API and conductor/engine parts correlates with the WSGI cross-project goal.

We also had a deeper discussion about ironic-inspector architecture earlier that week, where we were looking into potential future work to make ironic-inspector both HA and multi-tenancy friendly. It was suggested to split discovery process (simple process to detect MACs and/or power credentials) and inspection process (full process when a MAC is known).

Goals for Pike

• switch locking to tooz (with Redis probably being the default backend for now),

• split away API process with WSGI support,

• leader election using tooz for periodic tasks,

• stop messing with iptables and start directly managing dnsmasq instead (similarly to how Neutron does it),

• try using dnsmasq in active/active configuration with non-intersecting IP addresses pools from the same subnet.

Actions

also sambetts will write a spec on a potential workflow split.

Ironic UI

The project got some important features implemented, and an RDO package emerged during Ocata. Still, it desperately needs volunteers for coding and testing. A spreadsheet captures the current (as of beginning of Pike) status of features.

Actions

dtantsur, davidlenwell, bradjones and crushil agreed to dedicate some time to the UI.

Rescue

Most of the patches are up, the feature is tested with the CoreOS-based ramdisk for now. Still, the ramdisk side poses a problem: while using DHCP is easy, static network configuration seems not. It's especially problematic in CoreOS. Might be much easier in the DIB-based ramdisk, but we don't support it officially in the Ironic community.

RedFish driver

We want to get a driver supporting RedFish soon. There was some critics raised around the currently proposed python-redfish library. As an alternative, a new library was written. Is it lightweight, covered by unit tests and only contain what Ironic needs. We agreed to start our driver implementation with it, and switch to the python-redfish library when/if it is ready to be consumed by us.

We postponed discussing advanced features like nodes composition till after we get the basic driver in.

Small status updates

• Of the API evolution initiative, only E-Tag work got some progress. The spec needs reviewing now.

• Node tags work needs review and is close to landing. We decided to discuss port tags as part of a separate RFE, if anybody is interested.

• IPA API versioning also needs reviews, there are several moderately contentions points about it. It was suggested that we only support one direction of IPA/ironic upgrades to simplify testing. We'll probably only support old IPA with new ironic, which is already tested by our grenade job.