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Metal as a Service

maas.ubuntu.com

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Re: Metal as a Service

#71

Post by sparkiegeek »

Alupis wrote: post #55
tealeg wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

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

Re: Metal as a Service

#72

Post by aroman »

Alupis wrote: post #44
gmb_uk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#73

Post by Alupis »

sparkiegeek wrote: post #71
Alupis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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".

Re: Metal as a Service

#74

Post by toddan »

aroman wrote: post #72
Alupis wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Metal as a Service

#75

Post by rwmj »

4ad wrote: post #60
rwmj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice -- didn't know that Intel now had a serious remote management offering. These AMD mobos do wake-on-LAN, and that's it. They don't even have serial BIOS.

Don't even have? Apart from Soekris and boards that can use Corerboot, what x86 board does?

I've just thrown away a 2007-era SuperMicro single U machine with serial BIOS.

Re: Metal as a Service

#76

Post by SkyMarshal »

Alupis wrote: post #73
sparkiegeek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 billio…

Free Desktop OS is a loss leader, no way they'll make significant profit out of that. Better to make the best Free Linux desktop OS in the world, get lots of people using it, hopefully among them some engineers, influencers, and decision makers, then provide server/cloud products and services based on that same tech.

For one single data point, that's exactly why I use Ubuntu server for all my cloud deployments - because I use Ubuntu desktop and know the Ubuntu/Debian ecosystem really well.

Nothing wrong with that current business model, any problems are more a matter of execution and competing against - as you point out - heavily entrenched first movers. But focusing on desktop won't save them, especially since desktop is saturated and already peaked. Cloud and mobile is where the growth is now.

Re: Metal as a Service

#77

Post by giulivo »

pquerna wrote: post #37
rwmj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

> Additionally, both baremetal and OpenStack Ironic have a focus on 'triple-O', or OpenStack on OpenStack[2] use cases

Well, I'm sure they have issues but what gave you the impression they are focused on TripleO use cases?

As a TripleO dev I just use them.

Compared to more 'standalone' softwares like MAAS, these tools are integrated already into OpenStack, allowing you to deploy images on either virtual instances or baremetal without adding more software layers in charge of the images hosting, authentication, dhcp management and what not.

Re: Metal as a Service

#78

Post by bashinator »

4ad wrote: post #60
rwmj wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice -- didn't know that Intel now had a serious remote management offering. These AMD mobos do wake-on-LAN, and that's it. They don't even have serial BIOS.

Don't even have? Apart from Soekris and boards that can use Corerboot, what x86 board does?

Every single Supermicro and Tyan board I've ever used. Also every Dell, HP, and Sun/Oracle server I've ever used (though those can be a bit more of a pain). Really, anything with a halfway-decent IPMI implementation.

Re: Metal as a Service

#79

Post by ams6110 »

NateDad wrote: post #70
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…

You're right, but honestly a lot of those enterprise rationalizations about their "sensitive" data are just defending headcounts and turf. Google and Amazon probably do a better job securing data than 90% of enterprise sysadmins.

Re: Metal as a Service

#80

Post by 4ad »

rwmj wrote: post #75
4ad wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't even have? Apart from Soekris and boards that can use Corerboot, what x86 board does?

I've just thrown away a 2007-era SuperMicro single U machine with serial BIOS.

Nice to know that there are more machines like this.
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