Manual cleaning (as opposed to automated cleaning) encompasses all long running, manual, destructive tasks an operator may want to perform either between workloads, or before the first workload has been assigned to a node.

This feature had previously been called “Zapping” and this specification copies a lot of the zapping specification. (Thank you Josh Gachnang!)

Problem description
Automated cleaning has been available in ironic since the kilo cycle. It lets operators choose which clean steps are automatically done prior to the first time a node is deployed and each time after a node is released.

However, operators may want certain operations or tasks to only run on demand, rather than in every clean cycle. Things like firmware updates, setting up new RAID levels, or burning in nodes often need to be done before a user is given a server, but take too long to reasonably do at deploy time.

Many of the above tasks could provide useful scheduling hints to nova once hardware capabilities are introduced. Operators could use these scheduling hints to create flavors, such as a nova compute flavor that requires a node with RAID 1 for extra durability.

Upstream:
[1] - https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ironic/+spec/manual-cleaning