Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Metal as a Service

maas.ubuntu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 106 posts

Re: Metal as a Service

#61

Post by kikoreis »

danudey wrote: post #51
quantail wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 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 w…

I've been looking into MAAS for the simple task of 'put this customized Ubuntu instance on this server' and nothing beyond that. From your experience, would you say it would work for that? Or were the underlying fundamentals the problem?

That use case should work very well for a wide variety of hardware (and in fact I use it myself for a 20-node cluster). Issues may arise from networking and BMC unreliability, which the MAAS teams are currently working hard on addressing for this cycle.

Re: Metal as a Service

#62

Post by kikoreis »

panlinux wrote: post #13

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.

Yeah, 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

Re: Metal as a Service

#63

Post by teepo »

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…

SoftLayer 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#64

Post by kikoreis »

rwmj wrote: post #40
pquerna wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon 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…

Fair 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.

All 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_eng...

Re: Metal as a Service

#65

Post by teepo »

iamsalman wrote: post #58
flyt wrote: post #41

Any 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.

For 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...

You could do that on SoftLayer with monthly GPU servers. There's not an hourly option yet though.

Re: Metal as a Service

#66

Post by sharms »

I 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#67

Post by Alupis »

danudey wrote: post #57
Alupis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Syste…

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…

That is the entire point I"m making. You cannot go to the store and buy a Linux-based desktop nor laptop. Companies (and most home users) don't want anything to do with Windows 8, but are being forced off XP. This is the ideal opportunity to capitalize on such a market and make Linux Desktop's common-place.

Out of all the Linux vendor's and distro's, Canonical is the closest at achieving common-place... yet, they have stopped short at such a critical time.

Of course tablets are popular, so are phones. Both markets are more fierce than desktops due to massively low price-points and some companies (looking at you google) willing to sell their tablets at a loss.

Companies spend $3-10K on server hardware, not the OS. When you buy big-iron servers, it's actually very common-place to get a Linux OS already installed, or no OS so you can install your preferred distro. Server Software (the OS) support contracts absolutely make money... but so does desktop software support contracts.

Your assertion that desktop industry is not worth focusing on is not true. Tablets and phones are getting more popular, but desktops and laptops are not going anywhere anytime soon.

Re: Metal as a Service

#68

Post by kikoreis »

flyt wrote: post #41

Any 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.

That 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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#70

Post by NateDad »

flyt wrote: post #41

Any 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.

Wow, no. There's a ton of people that could use MaaS. People use the big public clouds because they're easy. With MaaS you can build your own cloud almost as easily, and skip the Amazon tax. It's great for big companies that want total control, it's great for any company that doesn't want their sensitive data in someone else's server room (there are a lot of these in finance and enterprise), and small companies that want the flexibility of the cloud without the huge monthly bills.
Post reply on HN