OpenInfra Days North America 2024 at Indiana University

This talk dives into Rackspace's use of Ironic for baremetal provisioning, including, but not limited to, the use of Ironic and Ansible to manage fleet lifecycles.

- How Rackspace is leveraging Ironic over legacy in-house Baremetal provisioning tools. Not just for OpenStack-related workloads, but for general data center server provisioning.
- How Rackspace is adopting the use of Virtual Media boot over PXE/DHCP to simplify network requirements in leaf/spine architectures
- How Rackspace is (re)contributing to the Ironic project based on these new efforts

I hope viewers can take away the following:
- Ironic does not require a full OpenStack ‘stack’, but can benefit from Neutron and other integrations, and can benefit from customizations (ie. ML2 plugin) that might be more suited for your use-case
- In addition to servicing baremetal workloads in a virtual world, Ironic is extremely useful as a general server deployment tool for all kinds of workloads (OpenStack, VMware, etc)