Orientation

MAAS in Brief

Canonical’s MAAS brings the dynamism of cloud computing to the world of physical provisioning and Ubuntu. Connect, commission and deploy physical servers in record time, re-allocate nodes between services dynamically, and keep them up to date and in due course, retire them from use.

MAAS is a new way of thinking about physical infrastructure. Compute, storage and network are commodities in the virtual world, and for large-scale deployments the same is true of the metal. “Metal as a service” lets you treat farms of servers as a malleable resource for allocation to specific problems, and re-allocation on a dynamic basis.

In conjunction with the Juju service orchestration software (see https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/), MAAS will enable you to get the most out of your physical hardware and dynamically deploy complex services with ease and confidence.

Do I Need MAAS?

MAAS certainly isn’t for everyone, but why not ask yourself these questions?

You probably SHOULD use MAAS if any or all of the following statements are true:

• You are trying to manage many physical servers.
• You want to deploy services with the minimum fuss.
• You need to get the most from your resources.
• You want things to work, repeatably and reliably.

You probably don’t need MAAS if any or all of these statements are true:

• You don’t need to manage physical hardware
• You relish time spent in the server room
• You like trying to set up complicated, critical services without any help

A Typical MAAS setup

MAAS is designed to work with your physical hardware, whether your setup includes thousands of server boxes or only a few. The key components of the MAAS software are:

• Region controller
• Cluster controller(s)
• Nodes

For small (in terms of number of nodes) setups, you will probably just install the Region controller and a cluster controller on the same server - it is only worth having multiple region controllers if you need to organise your nodes into different subnets (e.g. if you have a lot of nodes).