Interview with Devananda van der Veen, OpenStack Ironic Technical Project Manager
- Transfer
We present the ninth of a series of interviews with technical managers of the OpenStack project on the Mirantis blog. Our goal is to educate the wider community of technical experts and help people understand how they can contribute to and benefit from the OpenStack project. Naturally, the following is the viewpoint of the interviewee, not Mirantis.
The following is an interview with Devananda van der Veen, CTO of the OpenStack Ironic project .
Mirantis: Tell us about yourself.
Devananda van der Vin: I am a senior systems engineer at HP Cloud. I have been working here for more than 1.5 years, at the moment I am leading the Ironic project. Prior to that, I worked as a consultant and administrator of the MySQL database.
Question: What is your history of relationships with OpenStack? Why are you participating in the project?
Answer: For many years I worked with Monty Taylor and when he talked to me about OpenStack, my reaction was: “Oh, uh, great! Sounds cool! ” At that time, I already wanted to switch from MySQL to something new, and it was clear to me that OpenStack would be the next step in the development of technologies. MySQL has shown really rapid growth since about 2005. Therefore, I then directed my career to that direction, and I see that now the same thing is happening with OpenStack. I believe that the process we are involved in creating will have an impact on the entire IT industry, and I want to be part of this.
Question: What are your responsibilities as the technical manager of the Ironic project?
Answer: Determining the direction and coordinating the activities of developers is in many ways the same responsibilities as in other OpenStack technical projects. I am responsible for the development of the concept, I manage the code verification, guide developers, but I am away from the development itself. Inspire community to develop around Ironic.
Question: What is the most essential of what you need to do to keep the project active?
Answer: I want to create a project that helps a large number of different hardware vendors feel comfortable and don’t feel that they are competing for proprietary bits or splitting a project into parts. Actually Ironic is a service for provisioning hardware or bare metal in OpenStack. All hardware vendors, such as HP, Dell, and IBM, have proprietary hardware tools for managing hardware, such as the HP iLO server remote management engine or Dell's DRAC remote access controller. All of them bring additional functionality to the standard specification of the IPMI interface, and some of them implement it a little differently.
Question: Can you explain what is the role of the Ironic project in the framework of OpenStack? Why is it important?
Answer: This can be explained in two different ways, I will try to choose one.
Until now, in the process of developing OpenStack, we had to use other tools to deploy OpenStack, whether it be a couple of servers in your server cabinet or rack or a whole data center. The equipment was necessarily external to OpenStack.
Ironic's role is to provide the level of hardware provisioning that OpenStack did not previously have. Based on this role, one of Ironic's goals is to make TripleO (OpenStack-on-OpenStack) possible. All of the tools you use to deploy your end-to-end application in the cloud can be reused to deploy the cloud, which ultimately is another end-to-end application.
Question: What is the difference between Ironic and TripleO?
Answer: Ironic is a service that controls the power of a physical machine and writes an image to the machine. In addition, we have plans to make other management tasks possible. TripleO is located at a higher level in the stack and uses not only Ironic, but also many other services to deploy and manage the OpenStack cloud.
Question: Tell us about the Ironic community - who contributes to the project?
Answer: HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM and others. Of the hardware vendors, both HP and IBM are collaborating with us. Until now, IBM has largely been involved in a related project, the creation of the entire IPMI driver in Python, which has been ported from xCAT to the OpenStack community. It will be used by Ironic as a more scalable replacement for the ipmitool library inherited from the Baremetal code of the Nova component.
Question: Would you like to see more involvement from hardware vendors?
Answer: Yes, I would like to. Sure, I would like to see Dell. So far they are not involved in our project. Ironic is a very young project, and perhaps some hardware vendors have not yet seriously participated in it, simply because the code was not ready. I think we are rapidly approaching the level of complete readiness of the code, when people can quickly join us and add their own hardware drivers.
Question: What has the Ironic community accomplished so far?
Answer: Providing bare metal has inherited a large number of restrictions, since there was an initial attempt to launch it as part of the Nova Compute process. For the last 4 months or so, we have “torn” Ironic out of Nova, turning it into a standalone OpenStack service of the highest level. It has its own API service that can be scaled. It has its own message queue and the server side of the database, as well as the Conductor service - something between the Nova Conductor and Nova Compute services. Most recently, we added support for DevStack and the disk image constructor, as well as the python client; Tempest tests are under development. All this is necessary for any OpenStack project, but it seems to me that this is a pretty big achievement for a small team in just 4 months!
Question: What features will Ironic implement in the next release of OpenStack?
Answer: I can’t say for sure what Ironic functionality will be available in Icehouse.
Question: If you could wave a magic wand right now and turn Ironic exactly what you want to see it, what would it be at the moment?
Answer: I would like to see it scalable and fault tolerant. My definition of high availability in this context is its resilience to failures, and not its complete absence. Hardware failure is inevitable, but Ironic must be able to recover from failures.
I would like to see in its composition different drivers from various hardware vendors. I would like the drivers themselves to be publicly available, not proprietary. I would like Ironic to be able to manage all kinds of hardware, from ARM devices to “big hardware” - all the existing variety of equipment that I personally may not know about. I would like other people to contribute in the form of drivers so that all this is feasible and feasible.
Question: Are there any misconceptions regarding Ironic?
Answer: One of them is that Ironic is not a configuration database and that it will not store the state history. They asked me: “Will you monitor the fan speed, CPU temperature, and then take any action if something overheats?” My answer is no!".
But the biggest misconception at the moment is that you can use Nova Compute or Ironic to implement unprotected multi-user clouds based on bare metal. This is our goal, but for today we have definitely not reached it. There are a number of significant hidden problems associated with the security of unprotected cloud users working on the basis of "bare iron". If I could once again wave my magic wand, I would like all these problems to be resolved. This will require a huge collaboration of hardware vendors to develop reliable hardware, as well as address security issues at the firmware level, and not just regarding network load and user isolation. Some work on this is already underway, but I believe that we are still far from solving these problems. In the meantime, I want
Question: Another question from the “I would like to” series. Who would you like to be among the people involved in the Ironic project? Who is your ideal participant at the moment?
Answer: Developers who know how to work with the open source community, as they are not always easy to find. People with good experience administering systems in addition to programming, since most of what we do at Ironic is low. Yes, it is written in Python, but we do a lot to integrate with processes such as DHCP, IPMI and PXE, and I will need people who understand the security issues of firmware. The need for such team members, it seems to me, is currently not fully satisfied.
Question: Thank you for your time.
Answer: Thank you.
The following is an interview with Devananda van der Veen, CTO of the OpenStack Ironic project .
Mirantis: Tell us about yourself.
Devananda van der Vin: I am a senior systems engineer at HP Cloud. I have been working here for more than 1.5 years, at the moment I am leading the Ironic project. Prior to that, I worked as a consultant and administrator of the MySQL database.
Question: What is your history of relationships with OpenStack? Why are you participating in the project?
Answer: For many years I worked with Monty Taylor and when he talked to me about OpenStack, my reaction was: “Oh, uh, great! Sounds cool! ” At that time, I already wanted to switch from MySQL to something new, and it was clear to me that OpenStack would be the next step in the development of technologies. MySQL has shown really rapid growth since about 2005. Therefore, I then directed my career to that direction, and I see that now the same thing is happening with OpenStack. I believe that the process we are involved in creating will have an impact on the entire IT industry, and I want to be part of this.
Question: What are your responsibilities as the technical manager of the Ironic project?
Answer: Determining the direction and coordinating the activities of developers is in many ways the same responsibilities as in other OpenStack technical projects. I am responsible for the development of the concept, I manage the code verification, guide developers, but I am away from the development itself. Inspire community to develop around Ironic.
Question: What is the most essential of what you need to do to keep the project active?
Answer: I want to create a project that helps a large number of different hardware vendors feel comfortable and don’t feel that they are competing for proprietary bits or splitting a project into parts. Actually Ironic is a service for provisioning hardware or bare metal in OpenStack. All hardware vendors, such as HP, Dell, and IBM, have proprietary hardware tools for managing hardware, such as the HP iLO server remote management engine or Dell's DRAC remote access controller. All of them bring additional functionality to the standard specification of the IPMI interface, and some of them implement it a little differently.
Question: Can you explain what is the role of the Ironic project in the framework of OpenStack? Why is it important?
Answer: This can be explained in two different ways, I will try to choose one.
Until now, in the process of developing OpenStack, we had to use other tools to deploy OpenStack, whether it be a couple of servers in your server cabinet or rack or a whole data center. The equipment was necessarily external to OpenStack.
Ironic's role is to provide the level of hardware provisioning that OpenStack did not previously have. Based on this role, one of Ironic's goals is to make TripleO (OpenStack-on-OpenStack) possible. All of the tools you use to deploy your end-to-end application in the cloud can be reused to deploy the cloud, which ultimately is another end-to-end application.
Question: What is the difference between Ironic and TripleO?
Answer: Ironic is a service that controls the power of a physical machine and writes an image to the machine. In addition, we have plans to make other management tasks possible. TripleO is located at a higher level in the stack and uses not only Ironic, but also many other services to deploy and manage the OpenStack cloud.
Question: Tell us about the Ironic community - who contributes to the project?
Answer: HP, Red Hat, Mirantis, IBM and others. Of the hardware vendors, both HP and IBM are collaborating with us. Until now, IBM has largely been involved in a related project, the creation of the entire IPMI driver in Python, which has been ported from xCAT to the OpenStack community. It will be used by Ironic as a more scalable replacement for the ipmitool library inherited from the Baremetal code of the Nova component.
Question: Would you like to see more involvement from hardware vendors?
Answer: Yes, I would like to. Sure, I would like to see Dell. So far they are not involved in our project. Ironic is a very young project, and perhaps some hardware vendors have not yet seriously participated in it, simply because the code was not ready. I think we are rapidly approaching the level of complete readiness of the code, when people can quickly join us and add their own hardware drivers.
Question: What has the Ironic community accomplished so far?
Answer: Providing bare metal has inherited a large number of restrictions, since there was an initial attempt to launch it as part of the Nova Compute process. For the last 4 months or so, we have “torn” Ironic out of Nova, turning it into a standalone OpenStack service of the highest level. It has its own API service that can be scaled. It has its own message queue and the server side of the database, as well as the Conductor service - something between the Nova Conductor and Nova Compute services. Most recently, we added support for DevStack and the disk image constructor, as well as the python client; Tempest tests are under development. All this is necessary for any OpenStack project, but it seems to me that this is a pretty big achievement for a small team in just 4 months!
Question: What features will Ironic implement in the next release of OpenStack?
Answer: I can’t say for sure what Ironic functionality will be available in Icehouse.
Question: If you could wave a magic wand right now and turn Ironic exactly what you want to see it, what would it be at the moment?
Answer: I would like to see it scalable and fault tolerant. My definition of high availability in this context is its resilience to failures, and not its complete absence. Hardware failure is inevitable, but Ironic must be able to recover from failures.
I would like to see in its composition different drivers from various hardware vendors. I would like the drivers themselves to be publicly available, not proprietary. I would like Ironic to be able to manage all kinds of hardware, from ARM devices to “big hardware” - all the existing variety of equipment that I personally may not know about. I would like other people to contribute in the form of drivers so that all this is feasible and feasible.
Question: Are there any misconceptions regarding Ironic?
Answer: One of them is that Ironic is not a configuration database and that it will not store the state history. They asked me: “Will you monitor the fan speed, CPU temperature, and then take any action if something overheats?” My answer is no!".
But the biggest misconception at the moment is that you can use Nova Compute or Ironic to implement unprotected multi-user clouds based on bare metal. This is our goal, but for today we have definitely not reached it. There are a number of significant hidden problems associated with the security of unprotected cloud users working on the basis of "bare iron". If I could once again wave my magic wand, I would like all these problems to be resolved. This will require a huge collaboration of hardware vendors to develop reliable hardware, as well as address security issues at the firmware level, and not just regarding network load and user isolation. Some work on this is already underway, but I believe that we are still far from solving these problems. In the meantime, I want
Question: Another question from the “I would like to” series. Who would you like to be among the people involved in the Ironic project? Who is your ideal participant at the moment?
Answer: Developers who know how to work with the open source community, as they are not always easy to find. People with good experience administering systems in addition to programming, since most of what we do at Ironic is low. Yes, it is written in Python, but we do a lot to integrate with processes such as DHCP, IPMI and PXE, and I will need people who understand the security issues of firmware. The need for such team members, it seems to me, is currently not fully satisfied.
Question: Thank you for your time.
Answer: Thank you.