Would you be excited to have a single API and single pipeline for deploying your applications on your physical servers, as well as your virtual servers? OpenStack can now do this.

OpenStack enables running applications on virtual machines in a cloud - a public cloud, or your own private cloud. But, what if your application requires physical servers, or your production environment is too performance sensitive to run in VMs? The conventional approach is to use separate tooling, such as crowbar or razor, but deploying dev/test and production environments differently is a bad idea.

Using OpenStack Bare Metal Provisioning, it is possible to use the same API and the same pipeline to build, test, and deploy applications on both virtual and physical machines. I am leading the development effort behind the Ironic project, and will talk about the project history, current status and what you can expect from the code today, and our plans as it matures. I will touch on a few deployments that are live, and even though baremetal as-a-service is a very compelling use case, I will explain what remains to be done to get there.