With IaaS, common way to provide compute resources is to ask the hypervisor to allocate a bunch of VMs for you. Sometimes, however, allocating a bare metal machine could be essential to withstand higher workloads or harden data security. Running a container engine (like k8s) inside of a bare metal machine avoids double resource management and achieves higher density.

In this talk we will introduce the OpenStack project called Ironic - the bare metal provisioning and life cycle service that can also act as a hypervisor for the OpenStack compute service.. We will explain system design, typical hardware management workflow, upcoming features and future challenges.