~ltrager/maas/lp1654432_2.1

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MAAS: Metal as a Service

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Metal as a Service -- MAAS -- lets you treat physical servers like

virtual machines in the cloud. Rather than having to manage each

server individually, MAAS turns your bare metal into an elastic

cloud-like resource.

What does that mean in practice? Tell MAAS about the machines you want

it to manage and it will boot them, check the hardware's okay, and

have them waiting for when you need them. You can then pull nodes up,

tear them down and redeploy them at will; just as you can with virtual

machines in the cloud.

When you're ready to deploy a service, MAAS gives Juju the nodes it

needs to power that service. It's as simple as that: no need to

manually provision, check and, afterwards, clean-up. As your needs

change, you can easily scale services up or down. Need more power for

your Hadoop cluster for a few hours? Simply tear down one of your Nova

compute nodes and redeploy it to Hadoop. When you're done, it's just

as easy to give the node back to Nova.

MAAS is ideal where you want the flexibility of the cloud, and the

hassle-free power of Juju charms, but you need to deploy to bare

metal.

For more information see the `MAAS guide`_.

.. _MAAS guide: http://maas.io/