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Metal as a Service
- kovrik 12y agoToo much Metal for one day!
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- joshdance 12y agoI thought that this was related to Apples Metal.
- Maakuth 12y agoThis 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.
- angersock 12y agoYou've reinvented what we used to call dedicated servers. There is nothing new under the sun. Might as well call it physicalization. :)
- tealeg 12y ago:-) Of course it's not inventing anything, it's just providing a convenient way to commission those servers that can also be driven by other tools. If you bring a lot of server resource on line this is very handy. Juju, for example, can put things on MAAS servers, and one of the things it could put on there is a virtualised environment that could also be managed by MAAS and juju to deploy other workloads. MAAS knows some stuff about the hardware too, for example, how many network cards the machine has and on which networks, which means you can interrogate MAAS to find machines suitable for a given workload.
- marcoceppi 12y agoMAAS can already manage virtual machines to an extent (through libvirt) but adding storage support would be awesome.
- rwmj 12y agoIs this so novel? Both Amazon and OpenStack can provision and manage baremetal instances.
- pquerna 12y agoAmazon 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 12y agoFair 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 12y agoAll 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_engineer_ask_me_anything_about_the/ http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1e5o4p/iaman_exaws_eng...
- rwmj 12y agoThat is a very interesting thread, thanks. I think I was confusing dedicated tenancy with baremetal. Dedicated tenancy of course still runs on Xen.
- YokoZar 12y ago
- teepo 12y agoSoftLayer has been doing this since 2005. One API to provision and deploy compute on demand physical or virtual. Over 90% of their customer bases uses bare metal servers.
- sparkiegeek 12y agoAlong 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 12y agoI 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.
- jcastro 12y agoPortability; from looking at your site you're using a standard ATX motherboard. The Orange Box is for demoing MAAS/OpenStack and needs to be portable enough to go on a plane. Cool cluster btw, it'd be neat to see you blog about using MAAS on it.
- kapilvt 12y agoThat'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 12y agoNice -- 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.
- sparkiegeek 12y agoTo be honest, Intel's AMT is a bit of a PITA, but the Orange Boxes were assembled to have some resemblance to real racks of hardware. So remote out of band power control is essential. There's something quite magical about using Juju and MAAS on the Orange Boxes and seeing the LEDs light up as you scale out a service (e.g. juju add-unit -n 5 nova-compute).
- abakker 12y agoI believe that Softlayer - Now Acquired by IBM also has this capability.
- sparkiegeek 12y agoOne key difference is that MAAS is free as in beer and free as in speech. It's great for private clouds.
- KhalPanda 12y agoMetal as a service... \0/
- tribaal 12y ago> Metal as a service... \m/ FTFY :)
- infra178 12y agoI bet someone in marketing at Canonical shit their pants watching the WWDC yesterday.
- evand 12y agoEr, why? Apple stopped caring about the cloud and traditional server market a while back.
- cwyers 12y agoBecause Apple used the word Metal to name one of their new APIs?
- michaelbuckbee 12y agoApple's new Graphics API is called 'Metal'.
- emeidi 12y agoDid Apple present Cloud Services yesterday aside of the Dropbox clone (iCloud Drive)?
- Gracana 12y agoI don't think there is likely to be much confusion. Looks like this would be called "MAAS" or "Metal as a Service," never just "Metal."
- iLoch 12y agoTBH I thought this was announcing cloud based graphics rendering until I saw the Ubuntu domain.
- jseutter 12y agoIf you're referring to the use of Metal in the name, I doubt it. It is a different market. Canonical isn't out to make millions from a highly focused tool that gets a large amount of its value from being free for anyone to use, forever. A similar situation happened when Apple adopted the name Launchpad for one of their services.
- panlinux 12y agoIt'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 12y agoYeah, 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
- rdtsc 12y agoThis 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.
- gnopgnip 12y agoOVH uses something like this for all of their newer server offerings.
- quantail 12y agoWe 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.
- jaybuff 12y agoI had a very similar experience when I tried it a few months before you.
- quantail 12y agoYeah, we were psyched to use it as a private cloud deployment tool and to manage some development environments. It represented a interesting middle ground between a container like setup (docker) and a distributed computing model like Storm/Disco. A stack was run on it, however it lacked the polish, support and flexibility required to make it a platform worth investing in. That is not to say that we thought the idea was bad but that it was nowhere near mature enough for production last year. Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box.
- gmb_uk 12y ago> Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box. You're incorrect about that, but the MAAS team did suffer some short staffing last year that left us behind the curve. We've now increased the number of people working on MAAS, which is what allowed us to get large chunks of work – like integrating CloudBase's work for allowing MAAS to provision Windows machines – relatively quickly.
- hardwaresofton 12y agoWhile 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
- flyt 12y agoAny 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.
- iamsalman 12y agoEnterprises are going for a hybrid Cloud model with private in-house Cloud housing critical business data and public Cloud for CRM etc. Even for a decent 30-50 server Cloud, this would prove very relevant, though not that lucrative as a business for Canonical.
- iamsalman 12y agoFor scenarios where I want to use GPUs to power a large simulation or AI workload (example: deep learning) where compute performance is prime. Amazon, MS & Google don't offer bare metal running GPUs. This is where MAAS would be relevant though I'm not sure if the it supports NVIDIA/AMD GPU drivers and DMA yet...
- teepo 12y agoYou could do that on SoftLayer with monthly GPU servers. There's not an hourly option yet though.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kikoreis 12y agoThat comment is a bit harsh; I'm sure Ubuntu is pretty relevant regardless of MAAS. For instance, it's the #1 OS deployed as cloud guests anywhere, and it's the #3 desktop OS in the world. But you do raise an interesting point, which is that all the MDCs have their own homegrown infrastructure (which incidentally they will tell you they love to hate, or vice versa). That is definitely true, and they are not MAAS target customers. But it's also true that they are not the only places where you will encounter large deployments of servers, and if you believe that at least a segment of the server market will go towards more/many nodes (a.k.a hyperscale), then having something to reliably deploy and manage a bare-metal cluster is definitely essential.
- throwaway5752 12y agoMaybe someone with more familiarity can tell me how this differs from/expands on Cobbler?
- wmf 12y agoIt's from Canonical.
- tealeg 12y agoRobbie 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-of-the-cdo-a-5-year-journey-in-devops/ https://ubuhulk.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/canonicals-office-o...
- sharms 12y agoI 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.
- thanatropism 12y agoI 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 12y agoJono 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 ;-)
- brugidou 12y agoQuickly 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?
- kordless 12y agoThe docs say a minimum deployment is 6 boxes. :p
- hedwall 12y agoHow does this compare to something like Puppetlabs Razor?