Design for BMC eventing API

design/baremetal-operator/bmc-events.md

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+
+# Event Subscription API
+
+Users of bare metal hardware may want to receive events from the
+baseboard management controller (BMC) in order to act on them in the
+event of a hardware fault, increase in temperature, removal of a
+device, etc.
+
+## Status
+
+implemented
+
+## Summary
+
+The Redfish standard includes the ability to subscribe to events, which
+will cause hardware events to be sent in a particular format to a destination
+URI. This design document describes a Metal3 API for configuring a
+subscription. While Redfish is the primary target for this design, the
+Ironic API is vendor-neutral and seeks to provide a unified interface
+for configuring events.
+
+## Motivation
+
+Some environments run workloads that need to deal with potential
+faults or environmental changes quicker than they would get an alert
+through other channels. For example, some workloads may have a sidecar
+container that knows how to deal with an alert that a particular network
+interface went down, or that the CPU temperature reached a certain
+threshold.
+
+### Goals
+
+- Provide an API to manage subscriptions to events
+
+### Non-Goals
+
+- [Configurable events and thresholds](#configurable-events-and-thresholds)
+- Any kind of event polling
+- Software for processing the events, i.e. any webhook
+- BMC's beyond Redfish for now
+
+## Proposal
+
+### User Stories
+
+- I'd like to configure my BMC to send events to a destination URI.
+- I'd like to provide context to a particular event subscription.
+- I'd like to provide arbitrary HTTP headers
+- I'd like the baremetal-operator to reconcile on the
+  BMCEventSubscription resource, and ensure its state is accurate in
+  Ironic.
+
+## Design Details
+
+### Implementation Details
+
+```yaml
+apiVersion: metal3.io/v1alpha1
+kind: BMCEventSubscription
+metadata:
+  name: worker-1-events
+spec:
+   hostName: ostest-worker-1
+   destination: https://events.apps.corp.example.com/webhook
+   context: “SomeUserContext”
+   httpHeadersRef:
+     name: some-secret-name
+     namespace: some-namespace
+status:
+  errorMessage: ""
+  subscriptionID: aa618a32-9335-42bc-a04b-20ddeed13ade
+```
+
+- A BMCEventSubscription resource represents a subscription to the events generated
+  by a specific BMC.
+- Ironic will manage configuring the subscription using a vendor passthru API.
+- The BMCEventSubscription will maintain a reference to a BareMetalHost.
+- The BMCEventSubscription will allow injection of headers using a
+  reference to a secret, for example to provide basic auth credentials.
+- The BMCEventSubscription will reside in the same namespace as the referenced
+  BareMetalHost.
+- The BMCEventSubscription will maintain a reference to the subscription ID
+  obtained from the BMC.
+- The baremetal-operator binary will be expanded to include an additional
+  reconciler with a dedicated controller/reconcile loop for
+  BMCEventSubscriptions.
+
+### Open Questions
+
+### Risks and Mitigations
+
+#### Thundering herd
+
+Large numbers of events across large numbers of BareMetalHosts could generate a
+lot of traffic. Users can control how many events their webhook receives by
+configuring the alert thresholds out of band.
+
+### Dependencies
+
+### Test Plan
+
+There is some existing POC code for working with Redfish Events; we
+could build on this to implement a test framework for BMC events. We could
+also consider modifying sushy-tools to support emulated eventing.
+
+### Upgrade / Downgrade Strategy
+
+Not required as this is a new API being introduced
+
+### Alternatives
+
+#### Configurable events and thresholds
+
+This API is for subscribing to events of a pre-defined type. In cases
+where no particular type is available, users would need to configure it
+out-of-band. For example, one may want to have a TemperatureOver40C
+alert that monitors the enclosure's temperature.
+
+The Redfish standard itself does not seem to have a way to specify
+specific alerts and thresholds. For example, to receive an alert when
+the temperature exceeds 40C, one would need to configure this manually
+according to the vendor's reccomendations.
+
+Vendors, however, do provide vendor-specific ways to configure these
+thresholds, but it's hard to abstract to a neutral interface. For
+example, here is a [Dell example for temperature](https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/en-jm/idrac9-lifecycle-controller-v4.x-series/idrac9_4.00.00.00_redfishapiguide_pub/temperature?guid=guid-5a798111-407b-485d-b6fb-7d6e367d4ad4&lang=en-us).
+
+In the short term, Ironic has no plans to abstract the various vendor
+implementations (if they exist at all).
+
+## References
+
+- [Ironic Vendor Passthru for Subscriptions](https://storyboard.openstack.org/#!/story/2009061)
+- [Supermicro Redfish Guide](https://www.supermicro.com/manuals/other/RedfishRefGuide.pdf)
+- [DMTF: Redfish Eventing](https://www.dmtf.org/sites/default/files/Redfish%20School%20-%20Events.pdf)
+- [Redfish Event Controller (POC)](https://github.com/dhellmann/redfish-event-controller)
+- [Redfish Event Experiment (POC)](https://github.com/dhellmann/redfish-event-experiment)