How Ironic Helps
Ironic has evolved and grown since it was "just" a way to provide bare metal machines to OpenStack users, finding ways to effectively become a standalone bare metal as a service system, capable of providing the same features as a full hardware management application.
Ironic is API-driven and API-first, and it includes a full set of RESTful APIs that provide a common vendor agnostic interface, allowing provisioning and management of bare metal machines for their entire lifecycle, from enrollment to retirement. It takes into account possible multiple reconfigurations and reuse of the same device, where a node can be re-provisioned for different use cases over its life.
Ironic allows operators to provision bare metal machines instead of virtual machines. It provides generic drivers ("interfaces") that support standards like IPMI and Redfish, used to manage any type of bare metal machine, no matter the brand. At the same time, it's officially supported by different vendors that help maintain not only the Ironic code-base, but also their own interfaces included in the Ironic code to provide full compatibility with their specific features.
Ironic is developed in Python, it is open source, and it uses gerrit for code review. To ensure reliability of the code, Ironic uses the Zuul CI engine tool to run the basic unit and functional tests, and also to simulate bare metal machines using advanced virtualization techniques to be able to run more complex tests with different deployment scenarios, including upgrades and multinode environments.
