Comparison to the 2018 OpenStack Technical Vision¶
In late-2018, the OpenStack Technical composed a technical vision of what OpenStack clouds should look like. While every component differs, and “cloudy” interactions change dramatically the closer to physical hardware one gets, there are a few areas where Ironic could use some improvement.
This list is largely for the purposes of help wanted. It is also important to note that Ironic as a project has a vision document for itself.
The Pillars of Cloud - Self Service¶
Ironic’s mechanisms and tooling are low level infrastructure mechanisms and as such there has never been a huge emphasis or need on making Ironic be capable of offering direct multi-tenant interaction. Most users interact with the bare metal managed by Ironic via Nova, which abstracts away many of these issues. Eventually, we should offer direct multi-tenancy which is not oriented towards admin-only.
Design Goals - Built-in Reliability and Durability¶
Ironic presently considers in-flight operations as failed upon the restart of a controller that was previously performing a task, because we do not know the current status of the task upon re-start. In some cases, this makes sense, but potentially requires administrative intervention in the worst of cases. In a perfect universe, Ironic “conductors” would validate their perception, in case tasks actually finished.
Design Goals - Graphical User Interface¶
While a graphical interface was developed for Horizon in the form of ironic-ui, currently ironic-ui receives only minimal housekeeping. As Ironic has evolved, ironic-ui is stuck on version 1.34 and knows nothing of our evolution since. Ironic ultimately needs a contributor with sufficient time to pick up
ironic-uior to completely replace it as a functional and customizable user interface.
