OpenStack Ironic and the MLH Fellowship with CID

So I ironic, um, with, uh, generally there is, um, a cloud, which everybody's familiar with.

And, uh, a lot of people do not have to worry about under the hood what happens because at the end of the day, a cloud is also a physical server, but it's just abstracted away in such a way that you do not have to worry about all of that.

And OpenStack Ironic is that service within the OpenStack ecosystem.

So OpenStack is a suite of services that when deployed together, gives you access to a cloud.

So, and Ironic is that service that it uses to provision bare metal machines.

And bare metal machines are physical servers without an operating system.

That's basically what they are.

and so ironic comes into the picture it handles the entire server life cycle so from the enrollment that's recognizing the servers that it's going to be responsible for the nodes that is going to be responsible for enrollment um cleaning provisioning and deployment so the entire life cycle ironic does that including the firmware updates and every other thing that goes into getting a node from just the Bermuda node to an available node ready to be used in the world.

That's what Ironic does.

And we, I manage and maintain the nitty gritties, like the underdoghood, the code that Ironic leverages to make that happen.

So OpenStack basically, OpenStack Ironix basically just, um, makes it possible and easy to provision physical servers as easy as it is for managing cloud.

Is there any part of this project that you're working on right now that you're particularly excited about? Is there a new feature coming out or any work that you've done recently that really got you, you know, you're like, ah, this finally landed.

I'm delighted that it landed, you know.

There's always something exciting in OpenStack generally, but also my area of focus, which is OpenStack Ironic.

This cycle though, there has been a particular focus on security and security related fixes.

So a lot of the things that I would call exciting, which also happened to be the first time that I'm able to do them are things like writing advisories, the advisory for a new vulnerability that's getting passed and things like that.

So this cycle has mostly been focused on security fixes and releasing advisories and notes, depending on the severity of a particular vulnerability.

Um, but I've worked on pretty, uh, meaty features in Ironic that I'm proud of.

Not necessarily recently.

And one of those is the runbook feature.

Runbook is a feature that.

bundles together, automation and security guarantees.

So basically there's what we call cleaning and servicing in Ironic.

And what that means is you provide your own steps against Ironic to take action on a node.

Those steps might be to perform firmware updates, might be to clean up the storage, might be to configure some to run inspection on the node, then take inventory of the specifications detected and a whole lot of that.