Canonical Announces Metal as a Service

Canonical has announced a new provisioning tool, MAAS (for metal-as-a-service) which lets system administrators provision hyperscale deployments of physical servers. According to the website, MAAS is designed for horizontally scaled environments, such as big data workloads and internal clouds, but works just as well for any cloud-like deployment.

Mark Shuttleworth says: “Metal as a Service – MAAS – is a new way of thinking about physical infrastructure. Compute, storage and network are commodities on the metal just as they are commodities in the cloud. MAAS lets you treat farms of servers as a malleable resource for allocation to specific problems, and for re-allocation on a dynamic basis.”

According to the announcement, the tool’s web front end makes it easy for administrators to quickly add, update, commission, deploy, and retire physical servers. The web dashboard provides an at-a-glance overview of the status of the MAAS cluster, letting administrators easily see how much computing resource is available for deployment.

The MAAS roadmap calls for an update to MAAS with each point release of 12.04 LTS, extending the capabilities and range of hardware certified and supported by both Ubuntu and the MAAS.

MAAS is available for testing in 12.04 Beta 2, with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS scheduled for general availability on April 26, 2012. For more information, Click here.