Bare metal machines are the foundation of all modern computational infrastructures, from high performance computing, to cloud services, to videogames, 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, familiarise 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 makes 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 the recent years is also helping deploying 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:

Currently working as Senior Software Engineer for the tech company Red Hat
(https://www.redhat.com/en/about/company) since 5 years. He is specialised in bare metal management and its applications to various fields, like automated infrastructure deployment and management, and automated installation workflows, working also with all the cutting edge technologies like virtualization, containers, and cloud. In the past he has worked as System Administrator at the INAF-OAC (Cagliari, Italy) for 3 years until the end of 2010, before moving to France, where he still lives, to join Blizzard Entertainment (https://www.blizzard.com), one of the biggest video games company, growing to the role of Systems Engineer, learning to manage high availability infrastructures with thousands of servers and starting the adventure in the virtualization and containers world with Openstack and Kubnernetes. Seeking new challenges he decided to commit almost entirely to
the automation of bare metal management, joining the Openstack Ironic (https://ironicbaremetal.org/) upstream team as core member and Red Hat at the end of 2018, and more recently the Metal3 community (https://metal3.io/).