Metal as a Service • Hacker News Board

It'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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#14

Post by rwmj » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:14 PM UTC

sparkiegeek wrote: post #6

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

I 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) 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#15

Post by sparkiegeek » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:16 PM UTC

abakker wrote: post #7

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

One key difference is that MAAS is free as in beer and free as in speech. It's great for private clouds.

Re: Metal as a Service

#16

Post by rdtsc » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:17 PM UTC

This 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#17

Post by jcastro » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:22 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #14

sparkiegeek wrote: post #6

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

I 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 ) 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.

Portability; 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#18

Post by evand » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:22 PM UTC

infra178 wrote: post #10

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

Er, why? Apple stopped caring about the cloud and traditional server market a while back.

Re: Metal as a Service

#19

Post by emeidi » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:23 PM UTC

infra178 wrote: post #10

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

Did Apple present Cloud Services yesterday aside of the Dropbox clone (iCloud Drive)?

Re: Metal as a Service

#20

Post by kapilvt » Tue, Jun 03, 2014, 2:25 PM UTC

rwmj wrote: post #14

sparkiegeek wrote: post #6

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

I 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 ) 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.

That'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).