S3 volumes have to be imported through image store. So we have to interfaace with image store. Closing this issue since we explored this and came to a conclusion
This is dependent on getting BMC working in Openstack.
The packer builds executed from the local machines are awfully slow. This is slowing down the development iterations significantly. It is taking more than an hour and a half for the builds. This is forcing the devs to make changes to code in the gitlab UI and test the code via pipelines. The builds executed via pipeline take about 30 mins to finish. Having a local test build with quick iteration time before moving on to the pipeline is desirable for smooth dev experience.