Rackspace deploys a lot of servers. Over the years we’ve developed a huge variety of tools that we leverage to automate bare-metal deployment on behalf of customers. Recently we’ve undertaken a project to add Ironic to our arsenal of bare-metal deployment tools.
Ironic is an OpenStack project which offers an API for bare metal provisioning. Ironic's first "customer" has been the TripleO project, which targets Cloud operators searching for a means of easily bootstrapping hardware in a trusted environment.
This session will discuss the challenges we have faced in adapting Ironic for use in a multitenant environment. Topics covered will include network isolation, hardware security, operational reliability and how we have harnessed Ironic’s flexible driver model to automate provisioning for our customers. This session will also include a discussion of the direction and scope of Ironic and where the boundary should lie between Ironic and Nova.