OpenStack Kilo Design Summit

Boot and deploy driver behavior differs in ways which are not exposed nor discoverable in the API. Such differences are a break in the abstraction layer that Ironic provides, representing either a deficiency in a driver or in our API.

Vendor drivers naturally differ in their capabilities. The touch point for such capabilities are hidden either within the vendor passthru API endpoint, or nestled within special node properties or driver_info which only that driver can interpret. Neither approach is discoverable by a client.

In a heterogeneous environment, how does Ironic expose these differences to Nova and to users?


Hint: it is possible to use node.properties.capabilities to expose hints to the Nova scheduler, but this is not standardized, nor automatic, nor well documented, nor easily interpretable by a direct user.