[HH] Metal as a Service

[Federico Lucifredi]

On May 25, 2013, at 2:47 AM, Tom Metro <tmetro+hhacking at gmail.com> wrote:

> I just ran across Canonical's "Metal as a Service" (MAAS) project:
> https://maas.ubuntu.com/
> 
> which apparently is a tool for managing a cluster of servers, though at
> a lower level than what you typically see. It claims to offer similar
> management functionality as you'd find in a cloud management tool, such
> as the ability to spin up a node and load an OS image onto it, except in
> thus case you're going to the bare metal instead of talking to a base OS
> with a hypervisor.

You can think of MAAS as a PXE server on steroids. We use it to network install machines as its standalone role, but it sees most use with Juju.  To Juju, MAAS is a "bare metal provider", meaning it provides physical instances for Juju to provision services on using the same logic that would be used on a Cloud.

> It sounds like part of how it accomplishes this is by booting nodes over
> the network but how does it bring up hardware that's been powered off?
> Wake-on-LAN?

IPMI.

> 
> In any case, I was thinking it might be a useful tool for managing a
> cluster of Raspberry Pi or other ARM boards.

"Managing" to MAAS means controlling a pool of PXE-driven devices that were enlisted under its control, and provisioning what is installed on them.  Usually "deployment" or "provisioning" is used in this context, rather than managing.

MAAS is the most advanced PXE tool I have seen out there, but that brings me to two caveats with your ideas:
- PXE support on ARM hobbist level boards is poor or non-existent (different story if you purchase Datacenter devices like Calxeda's or HP's).
- Ubuntu does not run on R.PI boards, they are built using too old an ARM variant for the tuning we do on the distro.


Hope this helps -Federico

_________________________________________
-- "'Problem' is a bleak word for challenge" - Richard Fish
(Federico L. Lucifredi) - flucifredi at acm.org - GnuPG 0x4A73884C