Baremetal Nodes Management Automation with Open Source Tools

Bare metal machines are the foundation of all modern computational infrastructures, from high performance computing, to cloud services, to video games, to on-demand entertainment platforms, everything still relies on servers and other physical devices, and they’re not going away soon! Deploying and managing bare metal machines can be quite time consuming and not trivial; in this seminar we’ll see the complexity of the bare metal world, familiarize with some of its standards, and see how we can automate almost everything, from the deployment to the management to the decommissioning of servers.
We’ll explore various solutions based on open source software focusing on one in particular: Ironic. Its powerful architecture and API-driven features make Ironic one of the most powerful tools for automated bare metal management, adopted by the biggest open source cloud platform solutions, Openstack, as “Bare Metal as a Service” provider, in recent years it is also helping deploy Kubernetes on hardware infrastructure with the Metal3 project, but it’s also a powerful standalone service for pure servers handling. We’ll also have a look at some practical applications in the real world to show where and how Ironic is used and how a modern IT infrastructure can benefit from its application.

Brief CV of Riccardo Pittau:

He currently works as a Senior Software Engineer for the tech company Red Hat
(https://www.redhat.com/en/about/company) for 5 years. He specializes in bare metal management and its applications in various fields, such as implementation and management of automated infrastructures, and installation of automated workflows, also working with all cutting-edge technologies like virtualization, containers, and cloud. In the past, he worked as a system administrator at INAF-OAC (Cagliari, Italy) for 3 years until the end of 2010, before moving to France, where he currently lives, to work with Blizzard Entertainment (https://www.blizzard.com), one of the largest video game companies. There he grew as a Systems Engineer, learning to manage high-availability infrastructures with thousands of servers and starting his adventure in the world of virtualization and containers with Openstack and Kubernetes. In search of new challenges, he decided to dedicate himself almost entirely to the automation of bare metal management, joining the Openstack Ironic (https://ironicbaremetal.org/) upstream team as a core member and Red Hat at the end of 2018, and more recently the Metal3 community (https://metal3.io/).