ironic

Welcome to the third in my set of posts covering discussion topics at the nova juno mid-cycle meetup. The series might never end to be honest. This post will cover the progress of the ironic nova driver. This driver is interesting as an example of a large contribution to the nova code base for a couple of reasons -- its an official OpenStack project instead of a vendor driver, which means we should already have well aligned goals. The driver has been written entirely using our development process, so its already been reviewed to OpenStack standards, instead of being a large code dump from a separate development process. Finally, its forced us to think through what merging a non-trivial code contribution should look like, and I think that formula will be useful for later similar efforts, the Docker driver for example. One of the sticking points with getting the ironic driver landed is exactly how upgrade for baremetal driver users will work. The nova team has been unwilling to just remove the baremetal driver, as we know that it has been deployed by at least a few OpenStack users -- the largest deployment I am aware of is over 1,000…