Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.

MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

MAAS is intended to complement Juju, Canonical's service orchestration framework. Juju works a little bit like a package management system: administrators use Juju recipes (which are called Charms) to automatically deploy and configure various server software stacks. Juju integrates with MAAS, making it possible to centrally deploy software to the nodes in a MAAS cluster.

Using MAAS and Juju together can significantly reduce the difficulty of bringing up an Ubuntu-based private cloud. A system administrator can use MAAS to provision nodes and then use Juju to populate those nodes with complete software configurations for things like OpenStack or Hadoop.

Canonical is best known for its desktop Linux product, but the company has worked hard to convince potential adopters that Ubuntu is also a credible choice for servers. The availability of updates at no cost has helped to drive Ubuntu server growth over the past few years, but it still faces an uphill battle competing with Red Hat's highly successful Linux distribution. Canonical's strong focus on the cloud is one way that the company is working to differentiate Ubuntu as a Linux server platform.

For more details about MAAS, you can refer to Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post about the new project. The source code is available from Canonical's Launchpad project hosting service. MAAS is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04, an upcoming long-term support release that will arrive at the end of the month.





Read the comments on this post

Ubuntu 10.04 is out today, and there are quite a few improvements in "Lucid Lynx," a long-term support release. What's worth checking out, beyond the geeky guts? A pretty nifty social manager, a great music store, faster boot-ups, and more. More »

Any debate over open vs. closed systems has to touch on open-source software and the ways in which companies are attempting to build code as a community effort, while still profiting from it in some way. So I chatted with Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu, about how it walks the line between spending to support open-source software and finding a business model that works.

Canonical’s 330 employees are responsible for maintaining, supporting and selling service for Ubuntu, an open-source version of the Linux operating system for servers, desktops and computer manufacturers. Some 120-150 of the Canonical employees contribute directly to the new releases of the software that come out every six months, and most of the company’s revenue comes from supporting enterprise server customers and makers of computers that want to put Ubuntu on desktops. Consumers also download the software, but few pay Canonical for support. The company is not yet profitable.

Shuttleworth believes that in order to develop a strong business model around an open approach, one has to create an open option early, ideally through a strong standardization process and one also needs to have a lot of different open-source projects fighting it out.  For example, in the operating system world there wasn’t a strong history of open alternatives, which meant that Ubuntu had to out-open its proprietary competition, which has high costs.

In that way it has pushed Canonical perhaps further out toward open on the spectrum. Shuttleworth calculates the direct costs of being so open as bringing people together in ways that empowers them and makes them feel like members of a community, as well as reaching out and putting in place the infrastructure to create a company. However, there are indirect costs as well.

“There is a myth that being open is necessarily more efficient and cheaper, but there are no hordes of people showing up to do the hard stuff,” Shuttleworth says. “Occasionally wonderful, magical things happen — really incredible things do happen, like people show up unexpectedly with brilliant ideas — but it’s still hard and expensive and you still have to be willing to do all the hard and expensive things and do it in an open fashion. And you’re still likely to be accused of being open only when it’s convenient.”

He points to the cloud computing market as one that tends to give a lot of lip service toward openness but where a lack of a big standardization effort and robust open source competition could lead to a relatively closed ecosystem.

“The basic story there is pretty bad at the moment,” Shuttleworth says. He notes that proprietary infrastructure, hypervisors and even the APIs and ways data is stored can lock folks into one cloud for life. “We need real open alternatives early in the process, making it possible for people to build own cloud infrastructure that responds to the same APIs that Amazon’s do.”

He’s accepted that Amazon Web Services’ APIs for its web services, while not created through an open standards group, have become a de facto standard and said that it’s more efficient to build open-source code around Amazon APIs rather than try to develop new ones for accessing the cloud. Canonical has a partnership agreement with Eucalyptus, which offers open-source software to create an AWS-compatible cloud, where people can use Ubuntu  and Eucalyptus to create their own cloud computing platform. But Shuttleworth would like to see more open-source options other than Eucalyptus  for building out a cloud computing service of your own.

At the platform-as-a-service level, the issue around openness will be around moving data from cloud to cloud easily. There’s room there for an open standard or open databases, he said. But at every level, when considering building a business around open source software, he he believes that “you want a common and clear standard with competing open source versions using that standard.”

That keeps proprietary vendors at bay, and gives the companies building a business around the open-source software a chance to decide where they want to be on the open-to-closed spectrum. But it also introduces the prospect of fragmentation, which we’ll leave for a later post.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

For Open Cloud Computing, Look Inside Your Data Center

Linux: Finding new, good-looking, and complete themes for Linux systems can be a serious scavenger hunt. The Bisigi Project provides 13 free, well-rounded themes you can install all at once, customized for your monitor size. Take a peek at five of them. More »

Apple urgently needs to improve its strategy on the cloud. The iPad and the iPhone are perfect smart terminals for cloud computing. At some level Apple knows this, as it was pushing a MobileMe discount with iPads this weekend. But when you get your hands on an iPad, you realize that Apple missed a real opportunity for deep integration with its cloud offerings.

I've been a MobileMe user for a little while, since the transition from .Mac, and I like how it is integrated with OS X setup. On the iPhone, I love the over-the-air syncing of my bookmarks, contacts and calendar. I had expectations that the iPad would take this a step further.

However, the iPad is no more advanced than the iPhone in its cloud integration. I would have loved to have switched on the iPad, keyed in my MobileMe login, and automatically had my email, browser bookmarks, calendar and contacts set up for me, as well as the ability to load in ebooks through my iDisk, and have my photo galleries available.

Instead I was forced through the painfully overloaded iTunes application, and had to tether my device via USB to get all of my content on it. Setting things up was a crazy dance involving configuration in both iTunes and in the iPad's settings panel. To make matters worse, the iPad doesn't want to charge over USB. This means I need to plug it in twice: once to the charger, and then somewhere else to sync. Decent cloud access would have mitigated this a little.

I was genuinely surprised that the iWork and Photo applications for the iPad don't have built-in support for MobileMe. Email appears the be the only generally universal way of getting things out of the iPad.

Both OS X and Ubuntu offer me a much more pleasant out-of-box setup experience for connecting and synchronizing with cloud services. I suspect that because the iPad is divided up into little silos for each application, and iPhone OS doesn't offer any general notion of cloud services, it can only be this way for now.

I am hoping for a future where all I need to supply a device with is my identity, and everything else falls into place. This doesn't even have to be me trusting in a third-party cloud: there's no reason similar mechanisms couldn't be used privately in a home network setting.

I think the iPad is an amazing piece of hardware, and the most pleasant web browsing experience available. It is still very much a 1.0 device though, and its best days certainly lie ahead of it. I hope part of that improvement is a simple story for synchronization and cloud access.

Somewhat to my surprise, I'm equally as excited about the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) release for netbooks as I am by the iPad. The iPad is not yet a netbook-killer.

Nearly everything can be edited somehow in a Linux system, and that includes what each key press does. The gHacks blog shows us how to create global application shortcuts that fire up Firefox, a text editor, or anything you'd like. More »