---
prelude: |
    The Bare Metal as a Service team joyfully announces our OpenStack Stein
    release of ironic 12.1.0. While no steins nor speakers were harmed during
    the development of this release, we might have suffered some hearing
    damage after we learned that we could increase the volume well
    past eleven!

    Notable items include:

    * Increased parallelism of power synchronization to improve overall
      conductor efficiency.
    * API fields to support node ``description`` and ``owner`` values.
    * HPE iLO ``ilo5`` and Huawei ``ibmc`` hardware types.
    * Allocations API interface to enable operators to find and select
      bare metal nodes for deployment.
    * JSON-RPC can now be used for ``ironic-api`` to ``ironic-conductor``
      communication as opposed to using an AMQP messaging provider.
    * Support for customizable PXE templates and streamlined deployment
      sequences.
    * Initial support for the definition of "deployment templates" to
      enable operators to define and match customized deployment sequences.
    * Initial work for supporting SmartNIC configuration is included,
      however the Networking Service changes required are not anticipated
      until sometime during the Train development cycle.
    * And numerous bug fixes, including ones for IPv6 and IPMI.

    This release includes the changes in ironic's ``12.0.0`` release which
    was also released during the Stein development cycle and includes a number
    of improvements for Bare Metal infrastructure operators. More about our
    earlier stein release can be found in our
    `release notes <https://docs.openstack.org/releasenotes/ironic/stein.html#relnotes-12-0-0>`_.
