ironic-specs/priorities/ussuri-priorities.rst

Ussuri Project Priorities

This is a list of goals the Ironic team is prioritizing for Ussuri 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
Scale / Performance	TheJulia, arne_wiebalck
Bare metal program/SIG	TheJulia, arne_wiebalck
Deploy Steps	dtantsur, mgoddard
Replacing WSME	dtantsur
Node retirement/quarantine	arne_wiebalck, rpittau
Managed boot for inspection	dtantsur
Multitenancy/Machine Ownership	tzumainn
DHCP-less Deployments	etingof

Community Goals

Goal	Primary Contacts
IPv6 support	TheJulia
Drop Python 2.7 Support	iurygregory, rpittau

Experiment for the Future

Ironic is stable, but it doesn't mean we should not experiment and find new ways to solve the same problems. General consensus seems to be that this is an important step forward to allow ourselves to further enable the future.

We give ourself the freedom to Innovate, Experiment, Evolve, and of utmost importance the freedom to listen to our users.

Some of these things may be to just enable Software RAID 5/6, DHCP-less deployment, boot-from-url for IPv4, or even kexec deployment. The idea being that these are focused high-impact and tactical changes and we should encourage such capabilities to merge.

The ultimate goal being to deliver and respond to the needs of our users faster.

Details

Scale / Performance

Ironic is being used all over the world. From small clusters to clusters which may only be able to be described as "mind-boggling".

While scale brings a different class of problems, we have consumers and users which can be impacted through even small minor changes. We must bring visibility and awareness to this topic as well as ensuring we set expectations and communicate ideal architectures.

• Implement some lightweight stress and performance testing
• Documentation oriented to scaleing

It will be important to work with the Bare Metal SIG on this topic.

Deploy Steps

While a theme that was included in the Train cycle, the overall effort for deploy steps is ongoing. The Train cycle provided more interfaces capable of being leveraged via deploy steps. The primary goal is to support in-band execution of deploy steps with the focus being on leveraging Software RAID.

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.

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.

Node retirement/quarantine

Larger operators with Ironic have found themselves approaching a quandry of "What is the proper way to retire a machine from ironic?". A nearly identical topic has arisen from the Telecom world seeking to represent the state of the node more accurately with-in ironic as to represent if a machine is in a fault state or questionable state under-going investigation.

With that being said, we did not make progess on this issue in the past cycle due to a fundamental disagreements in perception. The Project Teams Gathering in Shanghai provided a forum for discussion where we realized that these are actually similar but separate issues. One is for a separate logic path in what could be three or six months, and the other is a change in present time.

Managed boot for inspection

In order to support edge architectures and on-demand inspection, we need to enable managing the activation of inspection through ironic.

Multitenancy/Machine Ownership

The reality of hosting environments is that someone owns the hardware. Sometimes this may be the tenant that needs to be on the hardware, and we can't expect them to have administrative access to all hardware.

Thus we need to support a model where a tenant can be granted access a piece of hardware.

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.

IPv6 support

The OpenStack Technical Committee had a goal for the Train cycle for projects to implement IPv6 testing in order to declare IPv6 support. We as a community are aware that our IPv6 support works, however the anticipated changes from a community standpoint were incompatible with the settings required to emulate physical baremetal.

Also, we have encountered some issues with testing IPv6 support where existing default binary builds that are published in distributions lack some of the required support to be enabled.

More information can be found in change 657174.

Drop Python 2.7 Support

Time has come to remove support for Python 2.7 as upstream security support for Python 2.7 is being dropped early in the Ussuri development cycle.