What is Metal as a Service (MaaS)
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I've recently learned that a semi-major IT channel on YouTube has been giving out some completely made up information that is very confusing around Metal as a Service. Unlike other concepts like IaaS, SaaS and PaaS which are generic and industry terms, MaaS is a specific term from Canonical's Ubuntu products. Webopedia has no other definition but that MaaS is an Ubuntu product.
Metal-as-a-Service, or MAAS, is a provisioning construct created by Canonical, developers of the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. MAAS is designed to help facilitate and automate the deployment and dynamic provisioning of hyperscale computing environments such as big data workloads and cloud services.
MAAS serves as a layer underneath Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and works with Juju to coordinate applications and workloads, deploying hardware and services that can dynamically scale up and down. Metal-as-a-Service is currently featured in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and is summarized by Canonical's Mark Shuttleworth as a provisioning tool for bringing "cloud semantics to the bare metal world."
The NTG labs have done some serious research into using MaaS for our labs to make it far easier to swap lab gear in and out rapidly. MaaS is a server provisioning platform for taking bare metal and turning it into ready made platforms essentially automatically. It allows the IT department (not a hosting provider, "as a Service" has no hosted implications) to provision hardware as close to automatically as can be imagined today. It's very cool technology although as little to no place in the SMB space as hardware is not replaced often enough for it to make sense.
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Thanks for the write-up.
