Metal as a Service (MaaS) is Ubuntu specific software service for physical servers. It can be used to set up the hardware to deploy service which needs to scale. One can think Metal as a Service (MaaS) as a cloud orchestration tool with simple web interface or command line interface, where the user can add, update and recycle the servers.
What is Metal as a Service (MaaS)? Is it Another Technology?
Bare Metal is nothing new. Virtualization actually is not a requirement per se for creating cloud computing layer, but basically it adds an abstraction layer and helps to manage the service. Google runs multi tenant cloud without virtualization without virtualization. Definitely, there are other example. It is, Canonical’s specialized service, it is; in fact, server orchestration solution by Canonical.
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What is Needed to Avail Metal as a Service (MaaS)?
It is practically like OpenStack Nova. Like, not actually interchangeable. The idea of Metal as a Service (MaaS) is nothing new, new part is that, it is basically a free service. Practically, Metal as a Service (MaaS) works quite closely with Ubuntu’s service orchestration tool name Juju to make faster deployment of the services fast in a scalable manner.
As A Service label is for the end user – it is itself not any technology which can be defined with RFC or IEEE standard. Three components needs to be installed :
1 | apt-get install maas maas-dhcp maas-dns |
Can we use it with Rackspace Cloud? Yes! We can use custom boot. But, there are easier ways like using Docker :
1 | https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/rackerlabs/maas-agent-docker/dockerfile/ |
We have to configure DHCP, Switch before getting the full setup. After explaining DCHP, Switch configuration in future articles, we will proceed to install Metal as a Service (MaaS) in real as video guide.
