The document discusses server provisioning using Canonical's MAAS (Metal as a Service) solution. MAAS allows organizations to provision physical servers as easily as virtual machines in the cloud, providing programmatic control over hardware. It describes how MAAS automates operating system deployment and can dynamically allocate physical resources to match workload requirements. MAAS helps organizations maximize the value of their hardware investments.
Today, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers have incorporated parallel data
processing framework in their clouds for performing Many-task computing (MTC) applications.
Parallel data processing framework reduces time and cost in processing the substantial amount of
users’ data. Nephele is a dynamic resource allocating parallel data processing framework, which is
designed for dynamic and heterogeneous cluster environments. The existing framework does not
support to monitor resource overload or underutilization, during job execution, efficiently.
Consequently, the allocated compute resources may be inadequate for big parts of the submitted job
and unnecessarily increase processing time and cost. Nephele’s architecture offers for efficient
parallel data processing in clouds. It is the first data processing framework for the dynamic resource
allocation offered by today’s IaaS clouds for both, task scheduling and execution. Particular tasks of
a processing job can be assigned to different types of virtual machines which are automatically
instantiated and terminated during the job execution
In this paper, Cartesian gives an overview of the ongoing barriers to cloud computing adoption and ways in which vendors are trying to addressing them.
We divide the paper into 5 sections:
• Baby Steps: The Use Case for Hybrid Cloud
• Private Cloud: Allowing IT to Sleep at Night
• Standardizing the Cloud: The Battle over APIs
• Thinking Outside the Box: Network Virtualization
• The Biggest Fear of All: Security
The past year was punctuated by significant advancements in Apache Hadoop and increasingly wider adoption of Hadoop technology across the enterprise. Companies are continuing to use Hadoop in exciting new ways to better serve their customers, inform product development and drive operational efficiency like never before. Join Mike Olson, founder and CEO of Cloudera, as he shares his twelve major predictions for Hadoop in 2012. He will also unveil predictions from key industry analysts.
Olson will discuss predictions for:
- Where new opportunities for Hadoop will be found within the enterprise
- How new projects being developed for and on Apache Hadoop will expand data analysis capabilities
- Ways that Apache Hadoop will help companies solve short term and long term business challenges
A virtual data center (DC) facility is typically a pool of cloud-enabled IT infrastructure wherein resources are specifically designed to cater to distinct business requirements in a safe and secured environment.
Today, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud providers have incorporated parallel data
processing framework in their clouds for performing Many-task computing (MTC) applications.
Parallel data processing framework reduces time and cost in processing the substantial amount of
users’ data. Nephele is a dynamic resource allocating parallel data processing framework, which is
designed for dynamic and heterogeneous cluster environments. The existing framework does not
support to monitor resource overload or underutilization, during job execution, efficiently.
Consequently, the allocated compute resources may be inadequate for big parts of the submitted job
and unnecessarily increase processing time and cost. Nephele’s architecture offers for efficient
parallel data processing in clouds. It is the first data processing framework for the dynamic resource
allocation offered by today’s IaaS clouds for both, task scheduling and execution. Particular tasks of
a processing job can be assigned to different types of virtual machines which are automatically
instantiated and terminated during the job execution
In this paper, Cartesian gives an overview of the ongoing barriers to cloud computing adoption and ways in which vendors are trying to addressing them.
We divide the paper into 5 sections:
• Baby Steps: The Use Case for Hybrid Cloud
• Private Cloud: Allowing IT to Sleep at Night
• Standardizing the Cloud: The Battle over APIs
• Thinking Outside the Box: Network Virtualization
• The Biggest Fear of All: Security
The past year was punctuated by significant advancements in Apache Hadoop and increasingly wider adoption of Hadoop technology across the enterprise. Companies are continuing to use Hadoop in exciting new ways to better serve their customers, inform product development and drive operational efficiency like never before. Join Mike Olson, founder and CEO of Cloudera, as he shares his twelve major predictions for Hadoop in 2012. He will also unveil predictions from key industry analysts.
Olson will discuss predictions for:
- Where new opportunities for Hadoop will be found within the enterprise
- How new projects being developed for and on Apache Hadoop will expand data analysis capabilities
- Ways that Apache Hadoop will help companies solve short term and long term business challenges
A virtual data center (DC) facility is typically a pool of cloud-enabled IT infrastructure wherein resources are specifically designed to cater to distinct business requirements in a safe and secured environment.
Today Cloud computing is used in a wide range of domains. By using cloud computing a user
can utilize services and pool of resources through internet. The cloud computing platform
guarantees subscribers that it will live up to the service level agreement (SLA) in providing
resources as service and as per needs. However, it is essential that the provider be able to
effectively manage the resources. One of the important roles of the cloud computing platform is
to balance the load amongst different servers in order to avoid overloading in any host and
improve resource utilization.
It is defined as a distributed system containing a collection of computing and communication
resources located in distributed data enters which are shared by several end users. It has widely
been adopted by the industry, though there are many existing issues like Load Balancing, Virtual
Machine Migration, Server Consolidation, Energy Management, etc.
Cloud computing has spawned a new taxonomy for IT. Ubuntu explains 50 key terms to help DevOps and IT professionals to lead their organizations through the journey to the cloud.
A detailed study of cloud computing is presented. Starting from its basics, the characteristics and different modalities
are dwelt upon. Apart from this, the pros and cons of cloud computing is also highlighted. Apart from this, service
models of cloud computing are lucidly highlighted.
The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) deployed a total of 12 IBM BladeCenter servers with Intel Xeon processors, 6 of which run VMware vSphere virtualization software, and is now migrating old physical servers to virtual machines. The new infrastructure is between four and seven times more compact and efficient, SRC can deploy a new server in one hour rather than the four or five hours previously needed and administrative costs had decreased.
Presented at ISSA CISO Executive forum 2012
Comments/Questions: bill.burns@netflix.com
(3/8: Replaced Keynote for PDF version for compatibility)
An adjunct to Jason Chan's Practical Cloud Security preso: http://www.slideshare.net/jason_chan/practical-cloud-security
SaaS is powerful and flexible cloud model with lots of applications available to get solution for any business computing problems. It is more profitable in terms of technical and financial ways.
The Journey Toward the Software-Defined Data CenterCognizant
Computing's evolution toward a software-defined data center (SDDC) -- an extension of the cloud delivery model of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) -- is complex and multifaceted, involving multiple layers of virtualization: servers, storage, and networking. We provide a detailed adoption roadmap to guide your efforts.
Short Economic EssayPlease answer MINIMUM 400 word I need this.docxbudabrooks46239
Short Economic Essay
Please answer MINIMUM 400 word
I need this maximum in 2,5 hour because now I’m doing the online final exam and the clock is ticking.
Question:
What is the purpose of the term sheet and why is it important? Be sure to write a detailed long essay to this question. Think about who the term sheet is written for, why it is written, and what does it need to convey.
Cloud Computing: Virtualization and Resiliency for
Data Center Computing
Valentina Salapura
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
[email protected]
Index Terms — Cloud computing, data center management,
data center optimization, virtualization, Infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Software as a service
(SaaS), high availability, disaster recovery, virtual appliance.
INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is being rapidly adopted across the IT
industry, driven by the need to reduce the total cost of
ownership of increasingly more demanding workloads. Within
companies, private clouds are offering a more efficient way to
manage and use private data centers. In the broader
marketplace, public clouds offer the promise of buying
computing capabilities based on a utility model. This utility
model enables IT consumers to purchase compute resources on
demand to fit current business needs and scale expenses
associated with computing resources. Thus, cloud computing
offers IT to be treated as an ongoing variable operating expense
billed by usage rather than requiring capital expenditures that
must be planned years in advance. Advantageously, operating
expenses can be charged against the revenue generated by these
expenses directly. In contrast, capital expenses incurred by the
purchase of a system need to be paid at the time of purchase,
but can only be depreciated to reduce the taxable income over
the lifetime of the system.
THE MAIN ATTRIBUTES OF CLOUD COMPUTING
The main attributes of cloud computing are scalable,
shared, on-demand computing resources delivered over the
network, and pay-per-use pricing. This offers flexibility in
using as few or as many IT resources as needed at any point in
time. Thus, users do not need to predict future resources they
might need, and to commit to capital investment in hardware.
This is especially advantageous for start-ups, and small and
medium businesses which might otherwise not be able to afford
the IT infrastructure they need to support their growing
business. At the same time, redirecting capital investment from
IT infrastructure to the core business is attractive even for large
and financially strong businesses.
From a technical perspective, cloud computing brings the
benefits of virtualization and multi-tenancy to scale-out
systems. Virtualization techniques allow multiple system
images to share the same hardware resources: CPU
virtualization techniques create multiple virtual hardware
systems, while network virtualization .
Iaas vs Paas vs Saas: Choosing the Right Cloud Computing Models for your Busi...Cyntexa
Discover the key differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud models to determine the best fit for your business. Understand what each model offers, their advantages and disadvantages, and when to use them. Explore detailed examples, and get insights on factors to consider when choosing the right cloud model. Learn how cloud computing can enhance your business operations, from flexibility and scalability to cost-effectiveness and innovation. Make an informed decision and leverage the power of the cloud to drive your business forward.
#cloudcomputing #cloudconsulting #cloud
Today Cloud computing is used in a wide range of domains. By using cloud computing a user
can utilize services and pool of resources through internet. The cloud computing platform
guarantees subscribers that it will live up to the service level agreement (SLA) in providing
resources as service and as per needs. However, it is essential that the provider be able to
effectively manage the resources. One of the important roles of the cloud computing platform is
to balance the load amongst different servers in order to avoid overloading in any host and
improve resource utilization.
It is defined as a distributed system containing a collection of computing and communication
resources located in distributed data enters which are shared by several end users. It has widely
been adopted by the industry, though there are many existing issues like Load Balancing, Virtual
Machine Migration, Server Consolidation, Energy Management, etc.
Cloud computing has spawned a new taxonomy for IT. Ubuntu explains 50 key terms to help DevOps and IT professionals to lead their organizations through the journey to the cloud.
A detailed study of cloud computing is presented. Starting from its basics, the characteristics and different modalities
are dwelt upon. Apart from this, the pros and cons of cloud computing is also highlighted. Apart from this, service
models of cloud computing are lucidly highlighted.
The Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC) deployed a total of 12 IBM BladeCenter servers with Intel Xeon processors, 6 of which run VMware vSphere virtualization software, and is now migrating old physical servers to virtual machines. The new infrastructure is between four and seven times more compact and efficient, SRC can deploy a new server in one hour rather than the four or five hours previously needed and administrative costs had decreased.
Presented at ISSA CISO Executive forum 2012
Comments/Questions: bill.burns@netflix.com
(3/8: Replaced Keynote for PDF version for compatibility)
An adjunct to Jason Chan's Practical Cloud Security preso: http://www.slideshare.net/jason_chan/practical-cloud-security
SaaS is powerful and flexible cloud model with lots of applications available to get solution for any business computing problems. It is more profitable in terms of technical and financial ways.
The Journey Toward the Software-Defined Data CenterCognizant
Computing's evolution toward a software-defined data center (SDDC) -- an extension of the cloud delivery model of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) -- is complex and multifaceted, involving multiple layers of virtualization: servers, storage, and networking. We provide a detailed adoption roadmap to guide your efforts.
Short Economic EssayPlease answer MINIMUM 400 word I need this.docxbudabrooks46239
Short Economic Essay
Please answer MINIMUM 400 word
I need this maximum in 2,5 hour because now I’m doing the online final exam and the clock is ticking.
Question:
What is the purpose of the term sheet and why is it important? Be sure to write a detailed long essay to this question. Think about who the term sheet is written for, why it is written, and what does it need to convey.
Cloud Computing: Virtualization and Resiliency for
Data Center Computing
Valentina Salapura
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
[email protected]
Index Terms — Cloud computing, data center management,
data center optimization, virtualization, Infrastructure as a
service (IaaS), Platform as a service (PaaS), Software as a service
(SaaS), high availability, disaster recovery, virtual appliance.
INTRODUCTION
Cloud computing is being rapidly adopted across the IT
industry, driven by the need to reduce the total cost of
ownership of increasingly more demanding workloads. Within
companies, private clouds are offering a more efficient way to
manage and use private data centers. In the broader
marketplace, public clouds offer the promise of buying
computing capabilities based on a utility model. This utility
model enables IT consumers to purchase compute resources on
demand to fit current business needs and scale expenses
associated with computing resources. Thus, cloud computing
offers IT to be treated as an ongoing variable operating expense
billed by usage rather than requiring capital expenditures that
must be planned years in advance. Advantageously, operating
expenses can be charged against the revenue generated by these
expenses directly. In contrast, capital expenses incurred by the
purchase of a system need to be paid at the time of purchase,
but can only be depreciated to reduce the taxable income over
the lifetime of the system.
THE MAIN ATTRIBUTES OF CLOUD COMPUTING
The main attributes of cloud computing are scalable,
shared, on-demand computing resources delivered over the
network, and pay-per-use pricing. This offers flexibility in
using as few or as many IT resources as needed at any point in
time. Thus, users do not need to predict future resources they
might need, and to commit to capital investment in hardware.
This is especially advantageous for start-ups, and small and
medium businesses which might otherwise not be able to afford
the IT infrastructure they need to support their growing
business. At the same time, redirecting capital investment from
IT infrastructure to the core business is attractive even for large
and financially strong businesses.
From a technical perspective, cloud computing brings the
benefits of virtualization and multi-tenancy to scale-out
systems. Virtualization techniques allow multiple system
images to share the same hardware resources: CPU
virtualization techniques create multiple virtual hardware
systems, while network virtualization .
Iaas vs Paas vs Saas: Choosing the Right Cloud Computing Models for your Busi...Cyntexa
Discover the key differences between IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS cloud models to determine the best fit for your business. Understand what each model offers, their advantages and disadvantages, and when to use them. Explore detailed examples, and get insights on factors to consider when choosing the right cloud model. Learn how cloud computing can enhance your business operations, from flexibility and scalability to cost-effectiveness and innovation. Make an informed decision and leverage the power of the cloud to drive your business forward.
#cloudcomputing #cloudconsulting #cloud
Comparison of Several IaaS Cloud Computing Platformsijsrd.com
Today, the question is less about whether or not to use Infrastructure as a Services (IaaS), but rather which providers to use. Cloud infrastructure services, known as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), are self-service models for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote data center infrastructures, such as compute, storage, networking, and networking services. Instead of having to purchase hardware outright, users can purchase Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) based on consumption, similar to electricity or other utility billing. Most providers offer the core services of server instances, storage and load balancing. When choosing and evaluating a service, it is important to look at issues around location, resiliency and security as well as the features and cost. In order to evaluate which provider best suits requirements.
People frequently use the terms IaaS, PaaS, FaaS, and SaaS interchangeably when discussing cloud computing service because all of these technologies operate behind the cloud.
Enterprise data-centers are straining to keep pace with dynamic business demands, as well as to incorporate advanced technologies and architectures that aim to improve infrastructure performance
IDC: Selecting the Optimal Path to Private CloudEMC
This IDC white paper discusses the challenges and benefits of various cloud paths: prebuilt or integrated infrastructure systems such as VCE Vblock, reference architectures such as EMC VSPEX, and traditional or "build your own" systems.
Techniques to optimize the pagerank algorithm usually fall in two categories. One is to try reducing the work per iteration, and the other is to try reducing the number of iterations. These goals are often at odds with one another. Skipping computation on vertices which have already converged has the potential to save iteration time. Skipping in-identical vertices, with the same in-links, helps reduce duplicate computations and thus could help reduce iteration time. Road networks often have chains which can be short-circuited before pagerank computation to improve performance. Final ranks of chain nodes can be easily calculated. This could reduce both the iteration time, and the number of iterations. If a graph has no dangling nodes, pagerank of each strongly connected component can be computed in topological order. This could help reduce the iteration time, no. of iterations, and also enable multi-iteration concurrency in pagerank computation. The combination of all of the above methods is the STICD algorithm. [sticd] For dynamic graphs, unchanged components whose ranks are unaffected can be skipped altogether.
Opendatabay - Open Data Marketplace.pptxOpendatabay
Opendatabay.com unlocks the power of data for everyone. Open Data Marketplace fosters a collaborative hub for data enthusiasts to explore, share, and contribute to a vast collection of datasets.
First ever open hub for data enthusiasts to collaborate and innovate. A platform to explore, share, and contribute to a vast collection of datasets. Through robust quality control and innovative technologies like blockchain verification, opendatabay ensures the authenticity and reliability of datasets, empowering users to make data-driven decisions with confidence. Leverage cutting-edge AI technologies to enhance the data exploration, analysis, and discovery experience.
From intelligent search and recommendations to automated data productisation and quotation, Opendatabay AI-driven features streamline the data workflow. Finding the data you need shouldn't be a complex. Opendatabay simplifies the data acquisition process with an intuitive interface and robust search tools. Effortlessly explore, discover, and access the data you need, allowing you to focus on extracting valuable insights. Opendatabay breaks new ground with a dedicated, AI-generated, synthetic datasets.
Leverage these privacy-preserving datasets for training and testing AI models without compromising sensitive information. Opendatabay prioritizes transparency by providing detailed metadata, provenance information, and usage guidelines for each dataset, ensuring users have a comprehensive understanding of the data they're working with. By leveraging a powerful combination of distributed ledger technology and rigorous third-party audits Opendatabay ensures the authenticity and reliability of every dataset. Security is at the core of Opendatabay. Marketplace implements stringent security measures, including encryption, access controls, and regular vulnerability assessments, to safeguard your data and protect your privacy.
Show drafts
volume_up
Empowering the Data Analytics Ecosystem: A Laser Focus on Value
The data analytics ecosystem thrives when every component functions at its peak, unlocking the true potential of data. Here's a laser focus on key areas for an empowered ecosystem:
1. Democratize Access, Not Data:
Granular Access Controls: Provide users with self-service tools tailored to their specific needs, preventing data overload and misuse.
Data Catalogs: Implement robust data catalogs for easy discovery and understanding of available data sources.
2. Foster Collaboration with Clear Roles:
Data Mesh Architecture: Break down data silos by creating a distributed data ownership model with clear ownership and responsibilities.
Collaborative Workspaces: Utilize interactive platforms where data scientists, analysts, and domain experts can work seamlessly together.
3. Leverage Advanced Analytics Strategically:
AI-powered Automation: Automate repetitive tasks like data cleaning and feature engineering, freeing up data talent for higher-level analysis.
Right-Tool Selection: Strategically choose the most effective advanced analytics techniques (e.g., AI, ML) based on specific business problems.
4. Prioritize Data Quality with Automation:
Automated Data Validation: Implement automated data quality checks to identify and rectify errors at the source, minimizing downstream issues.
Data Lineage Tracking: Track the flow of data throughout the ecosystem, ensuring transparency and facilitating root cause analysis for errors.
5. Cultivate a Data-Driven Mindset:
Metrics-Driven Performance Management: Align KPIs and performance metrics with data-driven insights to ensure actionable decision making.
Data Storytelling Workshops: Equip stakeholders with the skills to translate complex data findings into compelling narratives that drive action.
Benefits of a Precise Ecosystem:
Sharpened Focus: Precise access and clear roles ensure everyone works with the most relevant data, maximizing efficiency.
Actionable Insights: Strategic analytics and automated quality checks lead to more reliable and actionable data insights.
Continuous Improvement: Data-driven performance management fosters a culture of learning and continuous improvement.
Sustainable Growth: Empowered by data, organizations can make informed decisions to drive sustainable growth and innovation.
By focusing on these precise actions, organizations can create an empowered data analytics ecosystem that delivers real value by driving data-driven decisions and maximizing the return on their data investment.
2. 2
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
This document is designed to help
system administrators and DevOps focused
Organisations to understand bare metal server
provisioning, understand its value proposition,
and learn about how leading companies are
using server provisioning solutions within their
hyperscale environments. Canonical addresses
these requirements with the open source
utility MAAS (Metal as a Service).
This solution helps Organisations to take full
advantage of existing hardware investments
by maximising hardware efficiency, and a
pathway to leverage the performance and
security of hardware based solutions with
the economics and efficiencies of the cloud.
What you will learn
3. 3
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Christopher Wilder
ContentMarketing,Canonical
ChristopherWilderhasdomainexpertiseinCloud
Computing and Infrastructure, the Internet of
Things (IoT), machine learning, businessAnalytics,
networking, communications, and software
defined infrastructure.
Chris is the author of the book Big Software Has
Arrived, and the co-author of the best-seller,
Influencing the Influencers. Chris is a frequent
contributor to Forbes and TechTarget. He has
also published multiple columns on software
and technologies in The New York Times, Boston
Globe, CEO Magazine, and others. He serves
on TechTarget’s Cloud Advisory board, and
is a trusted advisor for dozens of technology
companies worldwide.
About the author
4. 4
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Executive summary
Cloud speed with bare metal
reliability and efficiency
Get the most out of your
hardware investment
How the smartest IT Pros let
software do the work
Make hardware investments
more strategic
Conclusion
Contents
05
08
11
13
17
18
5. 5
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
As Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, once
famously said of cloud “All it is, is a computer
attached to a network.” Larry and Oracle have
since embraced cloud technologies such as
OpenStack yet the basic premise that it starts
with a physical server and a network still holds
true. Organisations wishing to run a cloud on
premises need to master bare metal servers
and networking and this is causing a major
transition in the datacenter.
Big Software, IoT (Internet of Things), and Big
Data are changing how operators must architect
and deploy and managed servers and networks.
The traditional Enterprise scale-up models of
delivering monolithic software on a limited
number of big machines are being replaced by
scale-out solutions that are deployed across
many environments on many servers.
This shift has forced data centre operators to
look to alternative methods of operation that
can deliver huge scale while reducing costs.
As the pendulum swings, scale-out represents
a major shift in how data centres are deployed
today. This approach presents a more agile and
flexible way to drive value to cloud deployments
while reducing overhead and operational costs.
Scale-out is driven by a new era of software
(web, Hadoop, Mongodb, ELK, NoSQL, etc.)
that enables Organisations to takeadvantage
of hardware efficiencies whilst leveraging
existing or new infrastructure to automate
andscalemachinesandcloud-basedworkloads
acrossdistributed,heterogeneousenvironments.
This next generation of software brings new
automation and deployment tools, efficiencies,
and methods for deploying distributed systems
in the cloud.
Executive summary
Big Software is the key driver forcing
Organisations to focus on tools and models to
deploy and manage workloads and applications
spreadacrossscaled-outenvironments,including
disparate data centre and cloud environments.
All the while, optimising components within
distributed, often hyper-converged hardware
environments.
6. 6
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
However, no matter what infrastructure you
have, there are bare metal machines under
it, somewhere. When rolling out data centre
deployments, companies need a tool that can
provision everything they need, while working
with the infrastructure they have. For private
infrastructure to thrive in the cloud era, it must
be agile and efficient.
In the data centre, Organisations had
significant friction with the onboarding,
provisioning, and management of their
physical hardware. This is, in large part, why
Virtual Machines (VMs) became popular.
As VMs appeared and evolved within the
data centre, enterprises moved from purpose-
configured applications designated for
specific hardware configurations to more
general solutions designed to work within a
virtual machine environment.
Scale-up: Scale-Out:
Scale-up vs. Scale-out
7. 7
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
MAAS is trusted byHardware has always been an expensive and
difficult resource to deploy within a data centre,
but is unfortunately still a major consideration
for any organisation moving all or part of their
infrastructure to the cloud.
To become more cost-effective, Organisations
hire teams of developers to cobble together
software solutions that solve functional
business challenges while leveraging existing
legacy hardware in the hopes of offsetting
the need to buy and deploy more hardware-
based solutions. VMs require a hypervisor,
which enables streamlined operations through
software, but managing the hardware itself
remains a painful journey through proprietary
APIs and often incompletely-implemented
specifications like Distributed Management
Task Force’s IPMI (intelligent platform
management interface).
Organisations are looking for more efficient
waystobalancetheirhardwareandinfrastructure
investments with the efficiencies of the cloud.
Canonical’s MAAS (Metal As A Service) is such
a technology. MAAS is effectively a hardware
API that turns bare metal servers into its own
cloud, without virtual machines. MAAS is
designed for devops at scale, in places where
bare metal is the best way to run your app.
Big data, private cloud, PAAS and HPC all
thrive on MAAS.
8. 8
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Cloud speed with bare metal
reliability and efficiency
MAAS allows operators to deploy physical
hardware as opposed to virtual environments.
Within the service there are common
technologies like PXE (preboot execution
environment) and IPMI to ensure interoperability
and support for a range of hardware. MAAS
makes it easy to provision physical servers as
easily as deploying a virtual machine in the
cloud with full programmatic control over the
hardware and its capabilities. Further, MAAS
works across all vendors and operating systems
including Windows, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat
and Suse.
MAAS is the fastest way
to deploy operating systems
MAAS isn’t a new concept, but demand and
adoption rates are growing because many
enterprises want to combine the flexibility
of cloud services with the raw power of bare
metal servers to run high-power, scalable
workloads. MAAS, however, is a new way of
thinking about physical infrastructure and
how Organisations can leverage the best of
all worlds. This is especially true for compute,
storage, and networking as they have become
commodities in the virtual world. MAAS lets
enterprises treat farms of servers as malleable
resources for dynamic allocation to specific
areas within the ecosystem.
9. 9
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
MAAS is much like any XaaS business model
dedicated to a specific tenant, but the main
difference is customers choose the type of
computeconfigurationtheywantintheirservers
(e.g. x86, single dual, quad core processors)
combined with applicable storage, memory,
and other functionality. Applications and
workloads are deployed onto servers that
have the sufficient compute power, storage,
and an operating system that allows for
optimal performance and efficiency.
MAAS is the fastest way
to deploy operating systems
Search for more supported hardware on our partner portal.
10. 10
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
For example, when a new server needs to be
deployed, MAAS automates most, if not all, of
the provisioning process. Automation makes
deploying solutions much quicker and more
efficient because it allows tedious tasks to be
performed faster and more accurately without
human intervention.
Even with proper and thorough documentation,
manually deploying server to run web services
or Hadoop, for example, could take hours
compared to a few minutes with MAAS. This
is why IT Pros are looking at MAAS as a way to
make the most effective use of their team’s
precious resources and time. Moreover, MAAS
provides a uniform way to provide a hyperscale
environment for admins and users to load
applications onto servers via their preferred
automation tool, i.e. Chef, Puppet, Ansible,
Juju etc.
MAAS Region Controller (regiond)
11. 11
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Every IT department has made significant
investments in hardware. However, as the
cloud has disrupted traditional business models,
IT Pros needed to find a way to combine the
flexibility of the cloud with the power and
security of their bare metal servers. Canonical’s
MAAS solution allows IT Organisations to
discover, commission, and deploy physical
servers within any cloud environment.
As new services and applications are deployed,
MAAS can dynamically re-allocate physical
resources to match cloud-based workload
requirements. This means Organisations can
deploy both virtual and physical machines
across multiple architectures and virtual
environments, at scale.
MAAS was designed to make complex
hardware deployments faster, more efficient,
and with more flexibility. While there are many
use cases, below are a few segments that have
found success.
High Performance
Computing (HPC):
HPC relies on aggregating computing power
to solve large data-centric problems in subjects
like health care, engineering, business, science,
etc. Many large Organisations are leveraging
MAAS to modernise their OS deployment
toolchain (a set of tool integrations that support
development, deployment, and operations
tasks) and lower server provisioning time.
These Organisations found their tools were
outdated thereby prohibiting them from
deploying large numbers of servers. Server
deployments were slow, modular/monolithic,
and could not integrate with tools, drivers,
and APIs. By deploying MAAS they were able
to speed-up their server deployment times
as well as integrate with their orchestration
platform and configuration management
tools like Chef, Ansible, and Puppet, or
software modeling solutions like Juju.
Get the most out of your
hardware investment
12. 12
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Smart Data Centers
Servers installed within a data centre typically
serves a single purpose for the duration of its
life. Smart data centres enable the full utilisation
of hardware, thus improving the total cost of
ownership (TCO). With MAAS, smart data centre
operators like Walmart and Box can quickly
power off a server and install a different OS for
a few hours to perform different tasks. MAAS
enables multi purpose server usage which
improves efficiency and doesn’t let servers
go underutilised.
For example, banks typically use full server
power during their normal work hours, taking
in requests from customers (e.g. web banking).
During low volume traffic, unutilised server
power can be redeployed dynamically to do
perform other tasks e.g. fraud detection, batch
processing, etc. To make this process completely
automatic an orchestration tool is required,
but MAAS ensures the reallocation is done
quickly.
Hybrid Cloud
In a hybrid cloud environment, which is an
environment that leverages on-premise
or private cloud infrastructure with public
cloud utilising orchestration tools or service
modeling solutions, MAAS optimises and
unifies operations. MAAS exposes bare-metal
server provisioning operations and an API
(application programming interface) that can
be consumed by service modeling solutions
like Canonical’s Juju as the building blocks for
an optimised hybrid cloud.
As an example, many large enterprises that
rely on transactions as a major part of their
business model (retail, airlines, etc.) manage
their infrastructure via private cloud. However,
during peak demand times they require
extra support via public cloud providers like
Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and
Google Cloud Platform. Canonical’s Juju works
seamlessly between each environment to
ensure communications between public cloud
APIs and the organisation’s private cloud (i.e
OpenStack). In some cases, the private cloud
needs to run from bare metal servers (i.e.
Hadoop). In those cases, the only possible way
to interface at that level is with MAAS, which
provides an API that allows administrators
and users to provision solutions like a VM.
Each of these examples demonstrates how
forward-thinking Organisations are using
MAAS and other technologies to take full
advantage of their infrastructure investments.
13. 13
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
MAAS acts as an abstraction layer between the
management layer and the underlying physical
hardware. MAAS also can discover existing
hardware resources and automate many
management tasks, including:
• Installing, configuring, and monitoring bare
metal hardware. Including but not limited to,
servers, switches, power distribution units
(PDU)/mains distribution units (MDU), and
Data Acquisition Engines (DAE), etc.
• Install and upgrade firmware, patches,
and updates
• Automated server utilisation and
re-utilisation based on need
• Discovery of compute, network, capabilities,
and storage based on server
• Power on and off servers as needed
By automating these functions MAAS eliminates
the extensive manual process required for
traditional server operations and allows
Organisations to become more operationally
efficient.
Making MAAS Work
MAAS has a tiered architecture with a central
postgres database backing a ‘Region Controller
(regiond)’ that deals with operator requests.
Distributed Rack Controllers (rackd) provide
high-bandwidth services to multiple racks. The
controller itself is stateless and horizontally
scalable, presenting only a REST API.
Rack Controller (rackd) provides DHCP, IPMI,
PXE, TFTP and other local services. They cache
large items like operating system install images
at the rack level for performance but maintain
no exclusive state other than credentials to talk
to the controller.
How the smartest IT Pros let
software do the work
Physical availability zones
In keeping with the notion of a ‘physical
cloud’ MAAS lets you designate machines
as belonging to a particular availability zone. It
is typical to group sets of machines by rack or
room or building into an availability zone based
on common points of failure. The natural
boundaries of a zone depend largely on the
scale of deployment and the design of physical
interconnects in the data centre.
Nevertheless the effect is to be able to
a scale-out service across multiple failure
domains very easily, just as you would expect
on a public cloud. Higher-level infrastructure
offeringslikeOpenStackorMesoscanpresent
that information to their API clients as well,
enabling very straightforward deployment of
sophisticated solutions from metal to container.
14. 14
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
The MAAS API allows for discovery of the zones
in the region. Chef, Puppet, Ansible and Juju can
transparentlyspreadservicesacrosstheavailable
zones. Users can also specifically request
machines in particular Availability Zones.
Thereisnoforcedcorrelationbetweenamachine
locationinaparticularrackandthezoneinwhich
MAAS will present it, nor is there a forced
correlation between network segment and
rack. In larger deployments it is common for
traffic to be routed between zones, in smaller
deployments the switches are often trunked
allowing subnets to span zones.
By convention, users are entitled to assume that
all zones in a region are connected with very
high bandwidth that is not metered, enabling
them to use all zones equally and spread
deployments across as many zones as they
choose for availability purposes.
MAAS physical availability zones
15. 15
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
The node lifecycle
Each machine (“node”) managed by MAAS goes
through a lifecycle – from its enlistment or
onboarding to MAAS, through commissioning
when we inventory and can setup firmware or
otherhardware-specificelements,thenallocation
to a user and deployment, and finally they are
released back to the pool or retired altogether.
MAAS high availability
16. 16
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
New
New machines which PXE-boot on a MAAS
network will be enlisted automatically if MAAS
can detect their BMC parameters. The easiest
way to enlist standard IPMI servers is simply
to PXE-boot them on the MAAS network.
Commissioning
Detailed inventory of RAM, CPU, disks,
NICs, specific models, serial numbers, and
accelerators like GPUs itemised and usable as
constraints for machine selection. It is possible
to run your own scripts for site-specific tasks
such as firmware updates.
Ready
A machine that is successfully commissioned
is considered “Ready”. It will have configured
BMC credentials (on IPMI based BMCs) for
ongoing power control, ensuring that MAAS
can start or stop the machine and allocate or
(re)deploy it with a fresh operating system.
Allocated
Ready machines can be allocated to users,
who can configure network interface bonding
and addressing, and disks, such as LVM, RAID,
bcache or partitioning.
Deploying
Users then can ask MAAS to turn the machine
on and install a complete server operating
system from scratch without any manual
intervention, configuring network interfaces,
disk partitions and more.
Releasing
When a user has finished with the machine,
they can release it back to the shared pool
of capacity. You can ask MAAS to ensure that
there is a full disk-wipe of the machine when
that happens.
17. 17
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
Systems must be configured to ensure maximum
throughput and service delivery. Because each
application has different demands and resource
utilisation,manyOrganisationstendtoover-build
to compensate for peak-load, or they will over-
provision VMs to ensure enough capacity years
out. With MAAS, today’s IT Pros no longer have
to perform capacity planning five-years out.
Instead,theycandevelopstrategiesforcreating
differently configured hardware and cloud
archetypes to cover all classes of applications
within their current environment and existing
IT investments.
MAAS makes it possible for Organisations to
make the most of their hardware by enabling
hardware to reprovision systems for the needs
of the data centre. For example, a server used
Making hardware investments work
for transcoding video 20 minutes ago is now a
Kubernetes worker node, later a Hadoop Map-
Reduce node, and tomorrow something else
entirely.
One of the often overlooked components
to scale-out are the tools and techniques
for leveraging bare metal servers within the
environment. What happens in the next 3-5
years will determine how end-to-end solutions
are architected for the next several decades.
OpenStack has provided an alternative to
public cloud. Containers have brought new
efficiencies and functionality over traditional
VM models, and service modeling brings new
flexibility and agility to both enterprises and
service providers, while leveraging existing
hardware infrastructure investments to deliver
application functionality more effectively.
Further, by complementing MAAS with Juju, IT
Organisations can leverage bundles of Charms
(sets of encapsulated code for deploying and
managing services) to automatically deploy
and configure various server software stacks
and applications functionality. Juju integrates
seamlessly with MAAS, making it possible to
centrally deploy software to the hardware nodes
in a server cluster. Using MAAS and Juju together
can significantly reduce the difficulty deploying
an OpenStack private cloud, thereby increasing
time to market.
18. Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
The industry is at a pivotal period, transitioning
from traditional scale-up models of the past
to scale-out architecture of the future where
solutions are delivered on disparate clouds,
machines, and environments simultaneously.
IT customers need to have the flexibility of not
ripping and replacing their entire infrastructure
to take advantage of the opportunities the cloud
offers.Thisiswhynewarchitecturesandbusiness
models are emerging. Canonical’s MAAS is a
mature solution to help Organisations to take
full advantage of their cloud and legacy
hardware investments.
Conclusion
To download and install MAAS for free please visit
ubuntu.com/download/server/provisioning
Or to talk to one of our scale-out experts about
deploying MAAS in your datacenter contact us at
ubuntu.com/about/contact-us/form
Get started with MAAS
1818
Tweet this
Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
19. Server provisioning: What Network Admins and IT Pros need to know
19
Tweet this
At Canonical, we are passionate about
the potential of open source software to
transform business. For over a decade, we
have supported the development of Ubuntu
and promoted its adoption in the enterprise.
By providing custom engineering, support
contracts and training, we help clients in the
telecoms and IT services industries to cut
costs, improve efficiency and tighten security
with Ubuntu and OpenStack. We work with
hardware manufacturers like HP, Dell and
Intel, to ensure the software we create can be
delivered on the world’s most popular devices.
And we contribute thousands of man-hours
every year to projects like OpenStack, to
ensure that the world’s best open source
software continues to fulfil its potential.
About Canonical