Chapter 1. About the Bare Metal Service
The OpenStack Bare Metal service (ironic) provides the components required to provision and manage physical machines for end users. The Bare Metal service in the overcloud interacts with the following OpenStack services:
- OpenStack Compute (nova) provides scheduling, tenant quotas, IP assignment, and a user-facing API for virtual machine instance management, while the Bare Metal service provides the administrative API for hardware management.
- OpenStack Identity (keystone) provides request authentication and assists the Bare Metal service in locating other OpenStack services.
- OpenStack Image service (glance) manages images and image metadata.
- OpenStack Networking (neutron) provides DHCP and network configuration.
- OpenStack Object Storage (swift) is used by certain drivers to expose temporary URLs to images.
The Bare Metal service uses iPXE to provision physical machines. The following diagram outlines how the OpenStack services interact during the provisioning process when a user launches a new machine with the default drivers.
