Ocata Project Priorities

This is a list of development priorities the Ironic team is prioritizing for Ocata development, in order of priority. The primary contact listed is responsible for tracking the status of that work and herding cats to help get that work done.

Priority

Primary Contacts

Portgroups support

sambetts, vdrok

CI refactoring

dtantsur, lucasagomes

Rolling upgrades

rloo, jlvillal

Security groups

jroll

Interface attach/detach API

sambetts

Generic boot-from-volume

TheJulia

Driver composition

dtantsur

Rescue mode

JayF

Smaller things

jroll/all

Portgroups support

This has been in progress for a couple cycles now and is almost complete. It allows for using bonding to support a single connection over multiple NICs. Let’s get it done in Ocata.

Rolling upgrades

Many OpenStack projects are beginning to support rolling upgrades - we should too. Let’s do our part to make downtimes a thing of the past. This involves code changes, new multi-node CI jobs, and reviewer/developer documentation.

Security groups

This covers security groups on the provisioning network(s). It barely missed the Newton release and is essentially done, let’s finish it in Ocata.

Interface attach/detach API

This makes our API to attach a Neutron port to an Ironic port object a first-class API, rather than pushing data into a JSON blob. It also refactors how Nova attaches these ports together. This is a pre-requisite for VLAN-aware instances, so let’s get it done and unblock that for Pike.

Generic boot-from-volume

This work allows generic hardware to boot from cinder volumes or NFS, allowing diskless nodes to be managed by ironic. This also lays down the framework for hardware-specific implementations to be built.

Driver composition

This work refactors the way that drivers are composed internally, as well as allowing operators to mix and match drivers for each interface rather than guessing at which driver is which combination. This allows us to stop exploding our driver matrix with every interface addition.

Rescue mode

This is necessary for users that lose regular access to their machine (e.g. lost passwords). The spec was merged in Newton, the code is partially done, let’s put some effort into making progress here in Ocata.

CI refactoring

We have too many jobs, and we have a plan to consolidate those jobs. We need to do that ASAP, as infra isn’t interested in adding more jobs for us until then.

Smaller things

There’s a number of smaller changes we’d like to accomplish in Ocata, or larger things that are nearly code-complete. These include:

  • etags in the REST API

  • spec for ironic-python-agent’s REST API versioning

  • spec for deploy steps

  • spec for specific fault support

  • adding more notifications

  • soft power off and NMI support

  • node tags