Metal as a Service

This 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#5

Post by marcoceppi » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:04 PM UTC

Maakuth wrote: post #4

This 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 CP…

MAAS can already manage virtual machines to an extent (through libvirt) but adding storage support would be awesome.

Re: Metal as a Service

#6

Post by sparkiegeek » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:06 PM UTC

Along with Juju, this is a key technology which (literally) powers the Ubuntu Orange Box - http://www.ubuntu.com/cluster‎

Re: Metal as a Service

#7

Post by abakker » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:07 PM UTC

I believe that Softlayer - Now Acquired by IBM also has this capability.

Re: Metal as a Service

#8

Post by KhalPanda » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:10 PM UTC

Metal as a service... \0/

Re: Metal as a Service

#9

Post by rwmj » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:12 PM UTC

Maakuth wrote: post #4

This 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 CP…

Is this so novel? Both Amazon and OpenStack can provision and manage baremetal instances.

Re: Metal as a Service

#10

Post by infra178 » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:13 PM UTC

I bet someone in marketing at Canonical shit their pants watching the WWDC yesterday.