15 ms·

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 tryin

by gmb_uk 12y ago

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.

quantail 12y ago
Hey, thank you for developing it! There were a lot of cool working parts such as the Juju-gui and the way that nodes could be tagged for different charms. Though the way that charms deployed at the command line sometimes didn't appear in the gui vexed us. I like the idea of MaaS on the cloud in a box. A plug and play cloud has its uses though TechOps time is at a premium and rebuilding the stack unlikely. We ended up investing more time instead into Jenkins and gave up on the distributed computing issue by using 64 core, 512GB RAM servers.
Alupis 12y ago
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.
- bratsche 12y ago
  There's no money in desktop now, though. Maybe they need to expand into markets where there is money in order to pay for desktop development.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    Well, that's not very true. I think you mean to say, "Desktop is not sexy". Most homes have either a desktop, or a laptop, or both, sometimes multiples of each. Every business has at least 1 computer (desktop or laptop, sometimes multiples of both). So there very much so is a lot of money still in desktop. Right now if you want to purchase a factory Linux computer, your choices are severely limited. It's either System76, or the Dell Sputnik (which for some reason costs more than it's Windows counterpart). XP just expired. My company has a warehouse of 40 workstations running XP. We're looking into getting new hardware. Guess what... it'll be Windows because there are not many other options to price-shop around and/or get differing levels of support. There is indeed money in Linux Desktop.
    - nzonbi 12y ago
      My dream (currently impossible) is that Canonical would make money by selling hardware: a Canonical branded surface-3-alike, which can wirelessly connect to a giant desktop monitor, and still work as a second screen.
    - danudey 12y ago
      Sure, but all of those desktops and laptops, in businesses and homes, usually come with operating systems, be they Windows or OS X. On top of that, personal computer sales are stagnating and tablet and mobile markets are growing; if Ubuntu really wanted to get on the money train, that's probably a better place to go. There's no money in Linux Desktop any more than there's money in Windows Desktop, which is to say not much at all. The only PC-related industry that might be worth focussing on is laptops or tablets-as-laptops (e.g. Surface), but there's a huge amount of engineering work to be done on hardware support, battery life, etc., and most of the Windows 8 tablet hardware is garbage. Without creating their own Surface-type product (and having an actual market for it), it would be difficult for them to control enough to ensure proper support. Compare that to servers, where companies will shell out $3-10k per server for new servers (or hundreds of dollars a month). If you can add in some kind of premium support, management system, cloud something, etc. and charge a minimal amount, the money would be significant. Heck, give Amazon customers the option to opt in to a $1/mo support upgrade and that would be a decent income stream from people running their own servers who aren't highly technical.
- tealeg 12y ago
  If you go look at what companies are running in the cloud, and what companies are hosting their clouds on, Canonical and Ubuntu are the 800lb gorilla in the cloud market. If you were talking naively about where Canonical should focus to make money you'd have to favour cloud tech over the desktop. It's not a simple as that though, those two facts aren't separate - Ubuntu got to be the platform of choice for the cloud not just by being their early and investing in it, but also by being a great choice for the people developing cloud tech in over companies. Ubuntu in the cloud is a success story already and both the Ubuntu Desktop and Server are integral to that.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    I"m sorry but you are mistaken... if you look at server stats, majority of "the cloud" is RHEL/CentOS based. I'm not going to argue that there are not many people using Ubuntu for servers... but it's not the standard when you get to big deployments. (I think you are refering to Ubuntu being the default Linux choice on EC2 which certaintly helped it's popularity. However, EC2 is not even built from Ubuntu... it's RHEL/CentOS). But it doesn't really matter. Canonical is drifting from what could be great. The average user does not need tech support to use a modern linux desktop (have you tried recently? they have come a long long way even from 3 years ago). At a time when XP is EOL'ed, and people are looking for anything not Windows 8 -- Linux should be answering that call, but instead Canonical is waffling again. There is absolutely a void in the market. Let's not make this an argument. Time will tell, as does history. Canonical has fallen short on execution on almost every major project thus far. Maybe this one won't repeat history.
    - sparkiegeek 12y ago
      Where are you getting the stats that majority of the cloud is RHEL/CentOS? Published stats [1] show that Ubuntu dominates cloud deployments. [1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1318 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1318
      - Alupis 12y ago
        Yes, of course Mark Shuttleworth's personal blog is not bias (he's the owner of Canonical). Also, he's talking about deployments on Digital Ocean, ie. VM's. I'm talking about what actually makes the "cloud", ie. the "cloud". The "cloud" is built out of RHEL/Centos for the most part. Almost all the major "cloud" infrastructures have been built with RHEL/Centos. We can speculate why... but Red Hat has built a $1 billion+ revenue per year company out of "cloud" and enterprise support contracts. (because they were there first, and they focused on it... and after it became profitable, then they finally branches out into other markets.) The problem with Canonical IMO is they try to get into too many markets which ends up resulting in split finite resources. "Jack of all trades, master of none".
- danudey 12y ago
  I know dozens of companies using Ubuntu on servers, in the cloud, as VM hosts, etc. I don't know anyone using it on the desktop. Linux on the desktop is a tough sell to non-technical users (who don't need support, etc.), but technical users operating server clusters is big money.
- aroman 12y ago
  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.
  - toddan 12y ago
    I think Canonical should focus on the cloud and developers. At the moment most of the ones using Ubuntu are developers and Canonical should focus on producing a complete package with a nice and integrated development experience all the way from the could to the developer desktop.
  - tormeh 12y ago
    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 12y ago
      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.
CMCDragonkai 12y ago
Is MASS tightly integrated with Juju? I want to be able to use it at scale without JuJu.
- stubish 12y ago
  MaaS is not tightly integrated with Juju, and Juju is not needed to set it up. Juju supports many backends, one of which is MaaS.

by gmb_uk 12y ago

quantail 12y ago

Hey, thank you for developing it! There were a lot of cool working parts such as the Juju-gui and the way that nodes could be tagged for different charms. Though the way that charms deployed at the command line sometimes didn't appear in the gui vexed us. I like the idea of MaaS on the cloud in a box. A plug and play cloud has its uses though TechOps time is at a premium and rebuilding the stack unlikely. We ended up investing more time instead into Jenkins and gave up on the distributed computing issue by using 64 core, 512GB RAM servers.

Alupis 12y ago

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.

bratsche 12y ago
There's no money in desktop now, though. Maybe they need to expand into markets where there is money in order to pay for desktop development.
- Alupis 12y ago
  Well, that's not very true. I think you mean to say, "Desktop is not sexy". Most homes have either a desktop, or a laptop, or both, sometimes multiples of each. Every business has at least 1 computer (desktop or laptop, sometimes multiples of both). So there very much so is a lot of money still in desktop. Right now if you want to purchase a factory Linux computer, your choices are severely limited. It's either System76, or the Dell Sputnik (which for some reason costs more than it's Windows counterpart). XP just expired. My company has a warehouse of 40 workstations running XP. We're looking into getting new hardware. Guess what... it'll be Windows because there are not many other options to price-shop around and/or get differing levels of support. There is indeed money in Linux Desktop.
  - nzonbi 12y ago
    My dream (currently impossible) is that Canonical would make money by selling hardware: a Canonical branded surface-3-alike, which can wirelessly connect to a giant desktop monitor, and still work as a second screen.
  - danudey 12y ago
    Sure, but all of those desktops and laptops, in businesses and homes, usually come with operating systems, be they Windows or OS X. On top of that, personal computer sales are stagnating and tablet and mobile markets are growing; if Ubuntu really wanted to get on the money train, that's probably a better place to go. There's no money in Linux Desktop any more than there's money in Windows Desktop, which is to say not much at all. The only PC-related industry that might be worth focussing on is laptops or tablets-as-laptops (e.g. Surface), but there's a huge amount of engineering work to be done on hardware support, battery life, etc., and most of the Windows 8 tablet hardware is garbage. Without creating their own Surface-type product (and having an actual market for it), it would be difficult for them to control enough to ensure proper support. Compare that to servers, where companies will shell out $3-10k per server for new servers (or hundreds of dollars a month). If you can add in some kind of premium support, management system, cloud something, etc. and charge a minimal amount, the money would be significant. Heck, give Amazon customers the option to opt in to a $1/mo support upgrade and that would be a decent income stream from people running their own servers who aren't highly technical.
tealeg 12y ago
If you go look at what companies are running in the cloud, and what companies are hosting their clouds on, Canonical and Ubuntu are the 800lb gorilla in the cloud market. If you were talking naively about where Canonical should focus to make money you'd have to favour cloud tech over the desktop. It's not a simple as that though, those two facts aren't separate - Ubuntu got to be the platform of choice for the cloud not just by being their early and investing in it, but also by being a great choice for the people developing cloud tech in over companies. Ubuntu in the cloud is a success story already and both the Ubuntu Desktop and Server are integral to that.
- Alupis 12y ago
  I"m sorry but you are mistaken... if you look at server stats, majority of "the cloud" is RHEL/CentOS based. I'm not going to argue that there are not many people using Ubuntu for servers... but it's not the standard when you get to big deployments. (I think you are refering to Ubuntu being the default Linux choice on EC2 which certaintly helped it's popularity. However, EC2 is not even built from Ubuntu... it's RHEL/CentOS). But it doesn't really matter. Canonical is drifting from what could be great. The average user does not need tech support to use a modern linux desktop (have you tried recently? they have come a long long way even from 3 years ago). At a time when XP is EOL'ed, and people are looking for anything not Windows 8 -- Linux should be answering that call, but instead Canonical is waffling again. There is absolutely a void in the market. Let's not make this an argument. Time will tell, as does history. Canonical has fallen short on execution on almost every major project thus far. Maybe this one won't repeat history.
  - sparkiegeek 12y ago
    Where are you getting the stats that majority of the cloud is RHEL/CentOS? Published stats [1] show that Ubuntu dominates cloud deployments. [1] http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1318 http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/1318
    - Alupis 12y ago
      Yes, of course Mark Shuttleworth's personal blog is not bias (he's the owner of Canonical). Also, he's talking about deployments on Digital Ocean, ie. VM's. I'm talking about what actually makes the "cloud", ie. the "cloud". The "cloud" is built out of RHEL/Centos for the most part. Almost all the major "cloud" infrastructures have been built with RHEL/Centos. We can speculate why... but Red Hat has built a $1 billion+ revenue per year company out of "cloud" and enterprise support contracts. (because they were there first, and they focused on it... and after it became profitable, then they finally branches out into other markets.) The problem with Canonical IMO is they try to get into too many markets which ends up resulting in split finite resources. "Jack of all trades, master of none".
danudey 12y ago
I know dozens of companies using Ubuntu on servers, in the cloud, as VM hosts, etc. I don't know anyone using it on the desktop. Linux on the desktop is a tough sell to non-technical users (who don't need support, etc.), but technical users operating server clusters is big money.
aroman 12y ago
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.
- toddan 12y ago
  I think Canonical should focus on the cloud and developers. At the moment most of the ones using Ubuntu are developers and Canonical should focus on producing a complete package with a nice and integrated development experience all the way from the could to the developer desktop.
- tormeh 12y ago
  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 12y ago
    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.

CMCDragonkai 12y ago

Is MASS tightly integrated with Juju? I want to be able to use it at scale without JuJu.

stubish 12y ago
MaaS is not tightly integrated with Juju, and Juju is not needed to set it up. Juju supports many backends, one of which is MaaS.