Ironic

Ironic lacks a non-neutron centric network_interface

Bug #2063169 reported by Julia Kreger on 2024-04-23

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Ironic	Triaged	Medium	Unassigned

Bug Description

Networking is a critical function as it helps enable connection of devices to a meaningful infrastructure.

And it is an easy aspect to overlook, because in large part there are competing models in how such infrastructure is managed. After all, there are people always just looking for a quick solution to a problem, and then those who are doing comprehensive management of physical resources. We've seen the former time and time again within OpenStack. TripleO, Bifrost, and even Kolla all use/used Ironic this way. Then there is fully integrated in the form of a comprehensive management strategy where your moving machines and needing to manage the security risk of a machine being compromised or have an untrustworthy workload.

To achieve secure movement of Bare Metal outside of a fully integrated context, Ironic needs the ability to manage switches.

DPUs and IPUs make this even more complicated, as to deploy machines, we're rapidly approaching a world where we realistically need to manage network configuration on these devices *as well* as the switch fabric.

In other words, Ironic really needs to have an answer to this challenge and attempt to move this issue forward to no longer being an underlying issue to meet future capability needs of operators.

This item is to aid tracking for a specification item which has been posted to the ironic-specs repository.