Practical experiences with OpenStack on OpenShift - DevConf.CZ 2025

Speaker(s): Jack Henschel, Sven Kieske Running an OpenShift Baremetal cluster is a challenging task in itself - so why not add OpenStack on top of it? This brand-new deployment model for the well-known Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) project offers the ability to quickly bootstrap OpenStack environments, save computing resources and easier operations for administrators - in theory. In practice, we have found that orchestrating baremetal servers from inside a Kubernetes cluster requires knowledge of many moving pieces at various layers. Nevertheless, for organizations already comfortable with OpenShift, this approach provides a more familiar way to deploy and manage OpenStack without needing to become OpenStack wizards themselves. In this technical session we want to share what we have learned while building such a solution for our customer. We will talk about: Architecture overview for Red Hat OpenStack Services on OpenShift (RHOSO) Provisioning baremetal machines with Kubernetes operators (Metal3) Bootstrapping OpenStack control planes and data planes Automating this setup with infrastructure as code (GitOps anyone?) The challenges of hardware networking (IP address pools, bonds, VLANs, oh my!) Day 2 operations: living with the monster you’ve built How to avoid shooting your own foot (Gotchas) **Who should attend**: DevOps and Platform engineers, system administrators managing on-premises infrastructure, and brave souls who enjoy juggling complex distributed systems while maintaining their sanity. **Why attend**: Whether you're planning a similar deployment, curious about advanced OpenShift/OpenStack architectures, or simply enjoy watching others navigate treacherous waters so you don't have to, you'll walk away with practical insights and hard-won wisdom that no documentation will ever tell you. --- Full schedule, including slides and other resources: https://pretalx.devconf.info/devconf-...