ironic-specs/priorities/victoria-priorities.rst

Victoria Project Priorities

This is a list of goals the Ironic team is prioritizing for the Victoria development cycle, in order of relative size and dependency addressing.

Note that this is not our complete backlog for the cycle, we still hope to review and land non-priority items.

The primary contact(s) listed are responsible for tracking the status of that work and herding cats to help get that work done. They are not the only contributor(s) to this work, and not necessarily doing most of the coding! They are expected to be available on IRC and the ML for questions, and report status on the whiteboard for the weekly IRC sync-up. The number of primary contacts is typically limited to 2-3 individuals to simplify communication. We expect at least one of them to have core privileges to simplify getting changes in.

Goals

Priority	Primary Contacts	Target
Break the Cycle	Ironic Developers	Sprint 1
Move to all native Zuulv3 jobs	iurygregory	Sprint 1
Standalone Basic Authentication	stevebaker	Sprint 1
ISO Boot media pass-through	TheJulia	Sprint 1
Compatibility Matrix	TheJulia	Sprint 1
Replacing WSME	stevebaker	Sprint 2
Ramdisk TLS	dtantsur	Sprint 2
Make CI Manageable	Ironic Developers	Sprint 2
DHCP-less Deployments	iurygregory	Sprint 2
Move to oslo.privsep	iurygregory	Sprint 2
In-band Deploy Steps	dtantsur, mgoddard	Sprint 3
Redfish Interop Profile	arne_wiebalck, rpioso, rpittau	Sprint 3
Bare metal program/SIG	TheJulia, arne_wiebalck	Theme

Schedule Structure

The indicator for this schedule is to help provide those reviewing this document a rough idea of when one may anticipate functionality to merge and be released. Things may merge sooner or later.

Sprint 1

Targeted to be released around the week of June 29th, 2020.

Sprint 2

Starting after the release for Sprint 1.

Anticipated to be released the week of August 10th, 2020. Roughly two months after Sprint 1.

Sprint 3

Starting after the release of Sprint 2, anticipated to run the course of two months. This should be anticipated around the week of September 28th, 2020. It is important to note that the week of the OpenStack deadline for the final release candidate as part of the Victoria cycle. Ironic's "latest" release will be consumed by OpenStack for the Victoria release at this time.

Theme

General thematic work for general improvement in an area fall under the classification of theme. Largely this is work that may run the course of an entire release cycle or longer, where small incremental improvements or related work takes place.

Goals Details

In no particular order...

Break the Cycle

Ironic is a project which is consumed by other projects and ultimately makes its way into multiple products through these channels. In many ways, it is a swiss-army knife for operators. At the same time it becomes a semi-hidden implementation detail behind projects like TripleO Metal3, and even in a sense it can be a hidden detail for users of the OpenStack Compute API.

With this use, and ultimately to support their use cases, we need to do better in terms of trying to release early and often.

Sometimes there is no reason TO make a brand new release of Ironic or any of its components unless WE NEED to take action to fix it or we have added a new feature. Largely this is because we rely upon stable APIs and interfaces, at least in most cases.

While we would all love to see all of the features, we should be delivering in a model which conforms to Sem-Ver and not force artificial major version changes to match a cycle boundry and to create a branch point.

Having said this, it is time for us to move to an independent release model.

This has drawbacks, and will require a different approach for planning. And yet not all of Ironic's assets should be released in such a way. Some items that fall under our governance as a project have inter-dependencies which ultimately require continuing with the OpenStack release cycle model. Does that make those items any less part of Ironic? Absolutely not! But they are specific integration points, and we will always need to be mindful of the need to maintain those integration points.

Make CI Manageable

CI is a never ending pain point. It is a truth of the existence of a CI system in any software development process. The conundrum we face though, is we have an explosion of drivers, specific use cases we are concerned about, and ultimately we never want to break anyone. The natural end result is we have a huge number of CI jobs.

With a number of different jobs, one may think that it is easy to maintain.

And in a sense, they are right. Except what is lost is our testing model forces rechecks to re-run all jobs. It is actually a good thing in that context, yet bad in that any single transient failure can force the re-execution of all tests, again. And Again. And sometimes, yet again.

Ultimately, In order to make CI manageable, we need to improve our concurrency, and greatly reduce our overall job count. We do this by trying to use the same job to test multiple scenarios. Where we can't, we likely have a defect we should explore fixing. And if there is anything we can do to improve job execution time, we ultimately improve time to results for not just ourselves, but everyone.

Move to all native Zuulv3 jobs

The chosen OpenStack community goal for the Victoria cycle is to ensure that all jobs are Zuulv3 native. You can learn about this effort here.

Move to oslo.privsep

One of the proposed, but not selected by the OpenStack TC changes is to adopt the use of Oslo.Privsep. We think this is a good idea and will go ahead and proceed with this effort.

Compatibility Matrix

One of the weaknesses in Ironic's documentation is a lack of clarity regarding the functionality of features with-in drivers when comparing drivers side-by-side. Mainly because we want to encourage but not force driver maintainers to take particular improvements to their driver code.

And so, the hope is to fix this weakness in our documentation. Through clarity, the overall user experience should improve, and that is ultimately what we all seek.

In-band Deploy Steps

While a theme that has been part of several of our past cycles, we continue to working towards improving the functionality of Deploy Steps, and in this case the focus is for in-band usage.

Bare metal program/SIG

The most powerful thing the Ironic community can do this cycle is not actually in code, but in documentation. The recently created Bare Metal SIG is working on creation of a white paper as part of the Bare Metal logo program, and needs our help for stand-alone use cases.

Ramdisk TLS

One of the structural weaknesses in the ironic-conductor to ironic-python-agent security is that by default, it is not encrypted.

In large part because this is a difficult surface to secure. It is ephemeral, temporary, and often short-lived. Mechanisms to sign a certificate are also a bit more difficult to put in place. Does the TLS client check the certificate "common name" or "alias" field. Does that even matter for this usage. How do we handle virtual media versus PXE booting with a supplied ramdisk.

These are all questions and concerns that we must answer, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that an agent can automatically offer a TLS encrypted Restful API endpoint for the ironic-conductor to connect to.

Replacing WSME

Most long time contributors are aware of the headaches that WSME has brought the community, along with the fact that many projects have migrated away from it.

In order to move us to something which is supported by a broader community, the consensus from the Train Project Teams Gathering, was to move Ironic towards using Flask. We'll start with re-working a single endpoint and hopefully move through the rest of the API in a rapid fashion.

Standalone Basic Authentication

For standalone use cases to flourish, we must support another authentication mechanism. The simplest, is rather simple. Just HTTP Basic Authentication.

Maybe we won't just stop there, but "noauth" is simply not acceptable with edge infrastucture management.

DHCP-less Deployments

Deployment of machines at the edge requires the case where we do not control DHCP. Except there are cases where there might not be any DHCP server, and in such cases, we must supply networking configuration in the virtual media being attached to the physical machine being deployed.

This effort is carried over from the Ussuri development cycle, and with any luck will be merged early in the Victoria development cycle.

ISO Boot media pass-through

A recent idea is to better support the use of the ramdisk use case for operators wishing to trigger machine boot operations via a pre-mastered ISO, much like the existing ramdisk interface, however in this case, they have everything they need.

More information about this can be found in the specification document.

Redfish Interop Profile

The Redfish Forum has an interop profile mechanism to allow feedback in the process to convey what is and what is not supported.

Such a profile can be used by hardware vendors/manufacturers to assess/advertise to which degree Ironic can interact with their hardware. Equally consumers/clients of such hardware can use the profile to make sure the hardware they intend to buy works with Ironic or even make this part of their tendering/purchase process.