Very fast server provisioning for your data centre

Self-service, remote installation of Windows, CentOS, ESXi and Ubuntu on real servers turns your data centre into a bare metal cloud.

Welcome to metal-as-a-service.

Data centre automation

Your next rack is a bare metal cloud.
Metal-As-A-Service (MAAS) provisioning with Windows, ESXi, Linux.

  • Bare metal cloud with on-demand servers
  • Remote edge cluster operations
  • Infrastructure monitoring and discovery
  • Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT, Juju integration
  • Super fast install from scratch
  • VMWare ESXi, Windows, CentOS, RHEL, Ubuntu
  • Custom images with pre-installed apps
  • Disk and network configuration
  • API-driven DHCP, DNS, PXE, IPAM
  • REST API for provisioning
  • LDAP user authentication
  • Role-based access control (RBAC)
  • Hardware testing and commissioning
  • Verizon logo
  • Telefonica logo
  • Tele2 logo
  • Telecom Italia logo
  • NEC logo
  • Barclays logo

Deploy any OS image
on any hardware

MAAS delivers the fastest OS installation times in the industry thanks to its optimised image-based installer.
You can deploy:

Deploy Ubuntu, Redhat, CentOS, Windows on IBM, HP, Lenovo, Quanta Cloud Technology, Dell, Open Compute Project, Huawei, Cisco

Key features

  • Automation cog icon

    Automation ›

    Automatic discovery of every network device. BMC ops with IPMI, AMT and other protocols. PXE over IPv4 and IPv6 networks. APIs for DNS, DHCP, IPAM, server configuration and provisioning.

  • Speed icon

    Speed ›

    Zero-touch deployment of Ubuntu, CentOS, Windows and RHEL. Full deployment time is approximately two boot cycles plus two minutes for disk imaging.

  • Inventory icon

    Inventory ›

    Discover every PCI and USB device in every server. Inventory disk models and serial numbers. Provision machines based on specific configuration details to optimize your applications.

  • Storage layouts icon

    Storage layouts ›

    Create advanced filesystem layouts with RAID, bcache, LVM, ZFS and more. Automate storage configuration through APIs. Allocate servers based on storage.

  • IPAM icon

    IPAM, DHCP, DNS ›

    Configure server network interfaces with bridges, VLANs, bonds and addresses. Integrated, best of breed, highly available, open source DHCP and DNS.

  • Hardware testing icon

    Hardware testing ›

    Run tests to get up to date information about hardware health. Benchmark disk, RAM, CPU and network performance.

  • DevOps icon

    DevOps on bare metal

    Integration with Ansible, Chef, Puppet, SALT, and Juju. REST API, CLI and Python bindings enable full lifecycle and project automation.

  • Network monitoring icon

    Network monitoring ›

    Continuously observes network traffic and catalogs every active IP address of unknown origin. Discovers rogue devices, IPs and MAC addresses. Drives active scanning of network ranges.

  • Authentication icon

    Authentication and Identity

    Integrate with LDAP, Active Directory or SAML for central identity management and single-sign-on (SSO) across multiple MAAS regions.

  • Composable systems icon

    Composable systems

    Drive Cisco UCS, Intel RSD, HP Moonshot, and more. Supports dynamic hardware composition with Intel RSD.

  • Cloud metadata icon

    Cloud metadata

    Reuse standard cloud operations with cloud-init and metadata services. Hybrid multi-cloud operations now include bare metal, with no change in applications.

  • KVM Micro-cloud icon

    KVM micro-cloud

    Designate servers to host KVM virtual machines to be dynamically provisioned alongside physical servers.

A selection of customers

Real servers,
self-service

You run the data centre, but your end users decide what they want to do with the hardware. They love the cloud experience, but it’s more efficient for you to own the hardware.

MAAS provides super-fast self-service provisioning of Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS and ESXi.

Learn more about server provisioning with MAAS


Bare-metal,
cloud experience

MAAS implements all the standard features of a public cloud — like instance metadata and cloud-init. Your customers get complete control of the deployed machine.

Canonical created cloud-init and leads the project globally; we ensure that MAAS provides a first-class cloud experience for physical servers based on x86, ARM64, POWER and Z architectures.

Real-world MAAS



Storage

Inventory, testing and benchmarking

MAAS detects and inventories all the disks, in every server. You’ll have a single database of every model and serial number.

MAAS tests disks either non-destructively or destructively, with short or long write cycles, and learns about their performance.

RAID, LVM, Bcache, ZFS and more

Auto-tagging of SSD and rotary disk types makes it easy to know which disks to use for each application.

Your users configure the storage of any server they control: RAID, LVM, Bcache and ZFS. Configure boot, applications and backup disks exactly where you want them — and get the installed machine, a few minutes later.

Network

Detection and configuration

The most error-prone part of data centre operations is the network.

MAAS enables rapid convergence on a correct network configuration — for every server, in every rack. All NICs are detected and inventoried when a machine is enlisted in MAAS.

Discover the topology of the network — which NIC is plugged into which port on which switch. MAAS tests access to specific VLANs from each NIC.

Network bonds and VLANs can be configured too. Set all significant network operating properties through MAAS — and then validate that configuration with ephemeral machine booting and testing.

Monitoring

MAAS rack controllers provide local endpoints for all infrastructure services in the rack itself, and they also monitor the local network for rogue devices, IP addresses and MAC addresses.

Over time, you’ll know if there are ‘extra’ devices plugged into any fabric or VLAN that MAAS is asked to monitor.

Solve network mysteries faster with distributed network analysis and observation.

Learn how to configure and install MAAS


Your future data centre, available now

Carrier-grade infrastructure DNS, DHCP, and IPAM

MAAS integrates best-of-breed ISC DHCP and Bind9 DNS, and will operate these in high availability mode whenever redundant MAAS services are provided. Deploy the MAAS API services on two systems and you will have high availability API endpoints; deploy two rack controllers and all rack services are automatically redundant. MAAS uses the PostgreSQL database which supports redundant and highly available scenarios.

Devops on bare metal is easy with dynamic server provisioning

Take devops to bare metal for apps like big data, kubernetes, analytics, machine learning, private cloud, OpenStack, PAAS and HPC. Specialists love MAAS.

Open source software-defined data centre

MAAS is an open source SDDC solution used by telcos, financial institutions, media companies and supercomputer admins to take care of all the low-level details. PXE, IPMI, ILO and all the custom protocols needed for diverse vendor hardware support come together in one clean REST API with Python bindings for easy integration and automation. It includes full IPAM capabilities, providing a central database and REST API for all network addressing and naming information.

KVM MicroCloud for Edge Computing

MAAS offers the ability to create lean, on-demand KVM-based micro-clouds. This capability extends to fine-grained control over KVM storage and networking configuration, thereby accelerating deployment of applications in any environment constrained by physical footprint or requiring dedicated VM-based workloads.

Tackle your provisioning problems with MAAS


Automated operations

Big data

Quickly provision and tear down both physical and virtual servers with a modern operating system deployment toolchain. Perfect for high-performance computing (HPC).

Smart data centres

MAAS transforms DevOps with complex server workflows, including dynamic partitioning, application-driven resource scaling, automatic workload rebalancing and immutable infrastructure.

Intelligent hybrid clouds

MAAS helps you build unified hybrid cloud operations by exposing a bare-metal provisioning operations API that can be used with service modelling tools, like Juju, or configuration management tools, like Chef.


Lower cost of operations

Automated repurposing

MAAS helps you run different workloads at different times, using the same or different base operating systems, at both large and small scales.

Cost reduction

Decommission nodes during non-peak periods to save both energy and personnel requirements. Use the time to focus on day-to-day hardware management tasks, optimising usage patterns and internal processes.

Hardware and Virtual Machine management

Replace legacy in-house provisioning tools and their associated problems, such as development resources, debugging, QA, on-boarding and 'bus-factor', with a standard set of converged open source tools, at speed to any scale.


Optimised testing

Continuous integration (CI) testing

MAAS's API allows storage and networking to be rapidly reconfigured to match each test case, generating a clean bare-metal environment for every run.

Hardware testing at scale

Run sets of standard and customised tests on freshly provisioned machines and racks, transforming any new hardware provision and integration process.

Enterprise support
for MAAS

MAAS is freely available, open source software from Canonical. Support and commercial capabilities for MAAS are included with Ubuntu Pro for Infrastructure. This support is charged on a per-machine basis. For example, if Ubuntu Pro for Infrastructure is purchased for 100 machines, then MAAS support is also included for those 100 machines.

In the case where Ubuntu Pro for Infrastructure is not purchased for managed machines, then MAAS support can be purchased as a standalone service.

To be eligible for standalone support, Ubuntu Pro is always required for machines hosting MAAS itself.

The pricing for standalone support for machines managed by MAAS is as follows:

  Free Essential Standard Advanced
Per managed machine - annual $30 $50 $100
Phone and ticket support Office hours 24 hours a day, everyday
Response time - SLA Sev 1 4 hours 1 hours
Knowledge Base Yes Yes Yes
Role based access control (RBAC) Yes Yes Yes
High availability (HA) support Yes Yes Yes
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