As per subject. Currently instances only have their internal IP address which means they cannot be contacted directly. Specifically, users expect to be able to SSH to the machine where their recipe is running.
We tried this when using the nova network env and it turns out that there is an issue https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1100181#c5 I think this issue still exists in the neutron network env and cannot be fixed either.
Hmm I think I wrote that back when we were still using Nova networking... the situation is a bit different now in the newer environment with Neutron, so I think we can revisit it.
But thank you for reminding me of why we took it out, I knew there was a reason but couldn't remember it last week :-)
On Gerrit: https://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/5517/ I have tried this in my testing env and did not hit the issue mentioned in https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1100181#c5, so I think the issue has been resolved in the new env.
Beaker 24.0 has been released.