Open source review: Ubuntu OS 12.04 LTS

Canonical has created something it calls MaaS (metal-as-a-service, pronounced “mazz” for IT administrators.

“Deploying to the cloud is great, but sometimes you still want to deploy directly onto bare metal for optimum performance,” says Mark Baker, Canonical’s product manager, server.

“An instance of Hadoop or Cassandra for data intensive tasks would be a good example

“Using MaaS controls is a good way of allowing the IT administrator to use declarative rules to establish how every server should run.

“Setting up hundreds of servers can be time-consuming and prone to error, but MaaS takes control of those variables and brings order to data management.”

MaaS is capable of spinning up physical machines in the same manner as if they were cloud servers, in an on-demand format and then (as if they were cloud servers) also recycling them for use with different workloads at a later time. It provides dynamic allocation of workloads based on the capabilities of each server, plus even greater control over large-scale deployments.