
Metal as a Service - CMCDragonkai
https://maas.ubuntu.com/
======
quantail
We spent around 6 weeks trying to wrangle Juju and MaaS into a working state
in August 2013. Skimming through my notes we surmised the following.

* Auto-enrollment of nodes was tough to get working.

* Overlay and config management was weak and better handled by Puppet. Though Juju beans were touted as able to handle this.

* Juju 1.13 and maas 1.3 do not support isolated juju environments in the same maas cluster. No idea what version it is at now.

* Juju charms "local provider" is potentially very compelling but wasn't in a workable state.

In the end we abandoned it.

~~~
gmb_uk
Thanks for giving it a try. If you're ever thinking about trying it again, we
(MAAS team) would be happy to help.

Truth is that the problems that MAAS is trying to solve are _hard_ , and it's
taken us some time to solve them. We're spending a lot of time in this
development cycle working on the robustness of the MAAS node lifecycle.

MAAS 1.5 is significantly better than 1.3, and getting stronger all the time.
Similarly, Juju 1.18 and 1.19 are leaps ahead of 1.13 – the local provider is
now in a workable state and gets used a lot internally.

We at Canonical eat our own dogfood as far as MAAS and Juju are concerned.
We're using MAAS extensively in our DCs (though I don't think we use it for
100% of machines; I'm not privy to that knowledge) and the vast majority of
our core services are deployed using Juju.

~~~
Alupis
Maybe Canonical should stick to their core...

...and focus on Linux on the Desktop... instead of trying to be an
"Everything" company. Get the core down solid and _making money_ , then expand
into other markets.

~~~
aroman
I agree Canonical should stick to their core, but it's not the desktop. It's
cloud.

They've demonstrated they do not have what it takes to make desktop net
profitable for them.

They make most of their money by selling support for their cloud stuff — this
is what they should focus on. Desktop has done nothing but lose them money.

~~~
tormeh
Well, Canonical could always make their own laptops with perfect driver
support and charge a premium for that. I don't know why they're not. As of
right now the only laptops that consistently work well with Linux/Ubuntu are
Thinkpads and Thinkpads suck for e.g. gaming. No one except Microsoft can make
money selling an OS - and they can only do it because they have a massive
advantage in user training and software ecosystem. They tried to sue their way
to victory with Phone, but have eventually settled for the fact that they'll
have to sell hardware as well.

~~~
tealeg
Note that as of late both Apple and Microsoft are making moves towards "the OS
is free" for certain markets. I hear tell that Microsoft are even paying OEMs
to put Windows on phones.

------
sparkiegeek
Along with Juju, this is a key technology which (literally) powers the Ubuntu
Orange Box - [http://www.ubuntu.com/cluster‎](http://www.ubuntu.com/cluster‎)

~~~
rwmj
I wonder why they chose to use Intel NUC for this. It has dire
price/performance. I built a cluster (see
[http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=cluster](http://rwmj.wordpress.com/?s=cluster))
recently, and I used AMD hardware for it because (as of right now) the
performance is unbeatable for the price. I have a 32 core cluster that cost me
£1300 including everything except a metal box to put it in.

~~~
kapilvt
That's pretty cool. One of the goals for the orangebox was being robust and
compact enough to throw in a suitcase and fly to a conference. The nucs win on
compactness, and also via intel's vpro/amt can do remote power management (ie.
ipmi light).

~~~
rwmj
Nice -- didn't know that Intel now had a serious remote management offering.
These AMD mobos do wake-on-LAN, and that's it. They don't even have serial
BIOS.

~~~
4ad
Don't _even_ have? Apart from Soekris and boards that can use Corerboot, what
x86 board does?

~~~
bashinator
Every single Supermicro and Tyan board I've ever used. Also every Dell, HP,
and Sun/Oracle server I've ever used (though those can be a bit more of a
pain). Really, anything with a halfway-decent IPMI implementation.

~~~
4ad
We might be talking about different things. Soekris does this without IPMI.

~~~
bashinator
The IPMI spec lets you send the entire console (BIOS through login boot cycle)
out either the hardware serial port, or over a LAN for all those platforms.

------
rdtsc
This would be a very good thing to try if you always want to guarantee some
minimal level of performance. Say you are encoding audio or video or
performing some other time critical things.

It eliminates the virtualization host layer and, most importantly, interaction
from other guest VM machines.

------
Maakuth
This is an interesting concept and a good addition to all the IaaS offerings
around. Just one year ago, while doing my Master's thesis, I pondered the
possiblity of creating an IaaS that didn't involve virtual machines but
physical servers instead. This should be great especially for high performance
and special hardware needs. Next step would be all sorts of mixed blends
between virtual and physical servers: real CPUs and GPUs, but virtualized
storage, networking or what have you.

~~~
rwmj
Is this so novel? Both Amazon and OpenStack can provision and manage baremetal
instances.

~~~
pquerna
Amazon does not have a 'baremetal' instance type.

OpenStack 'can', but in practice the baremetal nova driver[0] has many issues,
and the newer OpenStack Ironic Project[1] is not yet ready for production
workloads.

Additionally, both baremetal and OpenStack Ironic have a focus on 'triple-O',
or OpenStack on OpenStack[2] use cases -- that is using these projects to
bootstrap an 'undercloud', for the hardware to be used by a higher level
virtualized cloud.

[0] -
[https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Baremetal)

[1] -
[https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Ironic)

[2] -
[https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO](https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/TripleO)

~~~
rwmj
Fair enough.

I was totally convinced that Amazon had baremetal instances available, but now
I cannot find anything, so that could probably be a figment of my imagination.

~~~
kikoreis
All of Amazon's EC2 compute instances are run on top of Xen; there is an
interesting Reddit AMA post with a lot of detail:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_eng...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_engineer_ask_me_anything_about_the/)

~~~
rwmj
That _is_ a very interesting thread, thanks. I think I was confusing dedicated
tenancy with baremetal. Dedicated tenancy of course still runs on Xen.

------
sharms
I set up MaaS in a couple of hours at home. I bought a couple of used Dell
C6105's off ebay for a great deal, and they work out of the box with MaaS.
Pretty nice to be able to remotely boot and image the servers, power them off
and on etc all from my home office.

The installation was straight forward and easy.

------
hardwaresofton
While this may not be in a easily workable state right now, this is really
awesome, now people can run their own clouds even easier. This removes some of
the value-add (and associated costs) of various VPS providers and cloud
offerings.

I currently manage one VPS that hosts multiple sites/apps that I work on, and
it's not the worst thing ever, but it could be easier. Right now I still SSH
in and restart services by hand, but a web interface would make that much
easier to manage.

If they allow for extensible plugins, we could see an explosion of nagios-like
functionality being developed, as well as even better free server monitoring
resources.

Really looking forward to seeing this progress

------
infra178
I bet someone in marketing at Canonical shit their pants watching the WWDC
yesterday.

~~~
evand
Er, why? Apple stopped caring about the cloud and traditional server market a
while back.

~~~
cwyers
Because Apple used the word Metal to name one of their new APIs?

------
brugidou
Quickly went through the docs:

* why do they require a "cluster controller" for each subnet (or vlan)? This seems like a waste of resources and added complexity. Is this a limitation because it's easier to set up for sysadmins than to request for a DHCP relay?

* how bad is the security? It seems that you approve clusters interfaces but MAC spoofing could do a lot of harm here.

Edit: I saw that the doc tells you to add network interfaces to manage
multiple clusters from a single controller. Assuming you do 802.1q this works
but what about multi-dc setups? Isn't this more complicated than a simple
relay?

------
thanatropism
I was disappointed to learn I can't RESTfully request the Sepultura-like cover
of George Michael's "Careless whisper" that keeps playing in my head.

~~~
tealeg
Jono Bacon was responsible for _that_ kind of Metal As A Service in Canonical
- he's moved on to the X-Prize now, you should try there ;-)

------
throwaway5752
Maybe someone with more familiarity can tell me how this differs from/expands
on Cobbler?

~~~
tealeg
Robbie Williamson, the man at the head of the responsible division of
Canonical has documented how Cobbler and Puppet were used in the early days
and how experiences there lead to MaaS being developed.

[https://ubuhulk.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/canonicals-
office-o...](https://ubuhulk.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/canonicals-office-of-
the-cdo-a-5-year-journey-in-devops/)

------
abakker
I believe that Softlayer - Now Acquired by IBM also has this capability.

~~~
sparkiegeek
One key difference is that MAAS is free as in beer and free as in speech. It's
great for private clouds.

------
panlinux
It's like your own cloud, but with real machines. Combine that with juju
(juju.ubuntu.com) and you can deploy complex services on bare metal just as
easily as in the cloud.

~~~
kikoreis
Yeah, exactly! That's what we showed off at a lot of recent demos, including
during the OpenStack presentation Mark did:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYdIJrJRLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsYdIJrJRLQ)

------
hedwall
How does this compare to something like Puppetlabs Razor?

------
kordless
The docs say a minimum deployment is 6 boxes. :p

------
gnopgnip
OVH uses something like this for all of their newer server offerings.

------
kovrik
Too much Metal for one day!

~~~
joshdance
I thought that this was related to Apples Metal.

------
KhalPanda
Metal as a service... \0/

~~~
tribaal
> Metal as a service... \m/

FTFY :)

------
flyt
Any infrastructure that is of a size needing this will already have in-house
tooling (Google/FB/Amazon/etc) and everybody else should be using public
clouds anyway. Ubuntu is grasping for relevance.

~~~
NateDad
Wow, no. There's a ton of people that could use MaaS. People use the big
public clouds because they're easy. With MaaS you can build your own cloud
almost as easily, and skip the Amazon tax. It's great for big companies that
want total control, it's great for any company that doesn't want their
sensitive data in someone else's server room (there are a lot of these in
finance and enterprise), and small companies that want the flexibility of the
cloud without the huge monthly bills.

~~~
ams6110
You're right, but honestly a lot of those enterprise rationalizations about
their "sensitive" data are just defending headcounts and turf. Google and
Amazon probably do a better job securing data than 90% of enterprise
sysadmins.

~~~
NateDad
I know that, and _you_ know that, but do they? In my experience, no. And also,
does the SEC know that? Possibly not. There's a lot of laws about this stuff
where if you screw it up, people can go to actual prison.

