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We spent around 6 weeks trying to wrangle Juju and MaaS into a working state in August 2013. Skimming through my notes we surmised the following. * Auto-enroll

We spent around 6 weeks trying to wrangle Juju and MaaS into a working state in August 2013. Skimming through my notes we surmised the following. * Auto-enrollment of nodes was tough to get working. * Overlay and config management was weak and better handled by Puppet. Though Juju beans were touted as able to handle this. * Juju 1.13 and maas 1.3 do not support isolated juju environments in the same maas cluster. No idea what version it is at now. * Juju charms "local provider" is potentially very compelling but wasn't in a workable state. In the end we abandoned it.

jaybuff 12y ago
I had a very similar experience when I tried it a few months before you.
- quantail 12y ago
  Yeah, we were psyched to use it as a private cloud deployment tool and to manage some development environments. It represented a interesting middle ground between a container like setup (docker) and a distributed computing model like Storm/Disco. A stack was run on it, however it lacked the polish, support and flexibility required to make it a platform worth investing in. That is not to say that we thought the idea was bad but that it was nowhere near mature enough for production last year. Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box.
  - gmb_uk 12y ago
    > Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box. You're incorrect about that, but the MAAS team did suffer some short staffing last year that left us behind the curve. We've now increased the number of people working on MAAS, which is what allowed us to get large chunks of work – like integrating CloudBase's work for allowing MAAS to provision Windows machines – relatively quickly.
    - quantail 12y ago
      Apologies for positing a supposition without knowing the facts. To be clear we are a great fan of Canonical's work and it's too easy complain about the few issues that praise them for the great work that is done every day on the Ubuntu platform. The bleeding edge of Open Source technology is oft a perilous place to do business.
  - danudey 12y ago
    I've been looking into MAAS for the simple task of 'put this customized Ubuntu instance on this server' and nothing beyond that. From your experience, would you say it would work for that? Or were the underlying fundamentals the problem?
    - kikoreis 12y ago
      That use case should work very well for a wide variety of hardware (and in fact I use it myself for a 20-node cluster). Issues may arise from networking and BMC unreliability, which the MAAS teams are currently working hard on addressing for this cycle.
gmb_uk 12y ago
Thanks for giving it a try. If you're ever thinking about trying it again, we (MAAS team) would be happy to help. Truth is that the problems that MAAS is trying to solve are hard, and it's taken us some time to solve them. We're spending a lot of time in this development cycle working on the robustness of the MAAS node lifecycle. MAAS 1.5 is significantly better than 1.3, and getting stronger all the time. Similarly, Juju 1.18 and 1.19 are leaps ahead of 1.13 – the local provider is now in a workable state and gets used a lot internally. We at Canonical eat our own dogfood as far as MAAS and Juju are concerned. We're using MAAS extensively in our DCs (though I don't think we use it for 100% of machines; I'm not privy to that knowledge) and the vast majority of our core services are deployed using Juju.
- quantail 12y ago
  Hey, thank you for developing it! There were a lot of cool working parts such as the Juju-gui and the way that nodes could be tagged for different charms. Though the way that charms deployed at the command line sometimes didn't appear in the gui vexed us. I like the idea of MaaS on the cloud in a box. A plug and play cloud has its uses though TechOps time is at a premium and rebuilding the stack unlikely. We ended up investing more time instead into Jenkins and gave up on the distributed computing issue by using 64 core, 512GB RAM servers.
- Alupis 12y ago
  Maybe Canonical should stick to their core... ...and focus on Linux on the Desktop... instead of trying to be an "Everything" company. Get the core down solid and making money, then expand into other markets.
  - bratsche 12y ago
    There's no money in desktop now, though. Maybe they need to expand into markets where there is money in order to pay for desktop development.
    - Alupis 12y ago
      Well, that's not very true. I think you mean to say, "Desktop is not sexy". Most homes have either a desktop, or a laptop, or both, sometimes multiples of each. Every business has at least 1 computer (desktop or laptop, sometimes multiples of both). So there very much so is a lot of money still in desktop. Right now if you want to purchase a factory Linux computer, your choices are severely limited. It's either System76, or the Dell Sputnik (which for some reason costs more than it's Windows counterpart). XP just expired. My company has a warehouse of 40 workstations running XP. We're looking into getting new hardware. Guess what... it'll be Windows because there are not many other options to price-shop around and/or get differing levels of support. There is indeed money in Linux Desktop.
kikoreis 12y ago
Thanks for trying; here's a commentary on your points: > * Auto-enrollment of nodes was tough to get working. > * Overlay and config management was weak and better handled by Puppet. Though Juju beans were touted as able to handle this. If you have any detail to share on these I'd love to hear more. The first point has long been a sore point in MAAS and we're doing a lot of work this cycle to improve auto-registration and dealing with BMC hardware. > * Juju 1.13 and maas 1.3 do not support isolated juju environments in the same maas cluster. No idea what version it is at now. You can definitely do that now -- all you need to do is to set up separate users in MAAS and use different credentials for each of those. We've used this recently in the field for demonstrations (to take advantage of limited hardware) > * Juju charms "local provider" is potentially very compelling but wasn't in a workable state. This also works today (and can be used independently of MAAS) and as of 1.18 is in great shape; I'm personally supporting a few companies using it in production.
e12e 12y ago
On a somewhat related note, here's a couple of links I found when looking around for more info on maas and juju: Virtme: a very promising start to get a proof of concept up and running -- sadly it appears to be abandoned?: https://manage.jujucharms.com/~virtual-maasers/precise/virtme https://manage.jujucharms.com/~virtual-maasers/precise/virtm... http://javacruft.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/virtme/ http://javacruft.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/virtme/ A (partial) list of manual steps that try to achieve the same (with the goal of ending up with an openstack poc): http://www.teale.de/tealeg/computing/cloud/kvm_maas_juju_openstack.html http://www.teale.de/tealeg/computing/cloud/kvm_maas_juju_ope... YMMV etc.
- tealeg 12y ago
  As the author of the 2nd link there, I'd advise some caution, it's old and not complete, I will update it at some point soon when I have time to run through my whole process again.
- sparkiegeek 12y ago
  You should probably start with Juju docs on setting up an environment with MAAS as a "provider" https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/config-maas.html https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/config-maas.html
  - e12e 12y ago
    Good point -- I probably should've linked back to the official docs too -- they are very good.
ashayh 12y ago
Had the exact same experience. Established opensource tools like Foreman and Cobbler work much better.

jaybuff 12y ago

I had a very similar experience when I tried it a few months before you.

quantail 12y ago
Yeah, we were psyched to use it as a private cloud deployment tool and to manage some development environments. It represented a interesting middle ground between a container like setup (docker) and a distributed computing model like Storm/Disco. A stack was run on it, however it lacked the polish, support and flexibility required to make it a platform worth investing in. That is not to say that we thought the idea was bad but that it was nowhere near mature enough for production last year. Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box.
- gmb_uk 12y ago
  > Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box. You're incorrect about that, but the MAAS team did suffer some short staffing last year that left us behind the curve. We've now increased the number of people working on MAAS, which is what allowed us to get large chunks of work – like integrating CloudBase's work for allowing MAAS to provision Windows machines – relatively quickly.
  - quantail 12y ago
    Apologies for positing a supposition without knowing the facts. To be clear we are a great fan of Canonical's work and it's too easy complain about the few issues that praise them for the great work that is done every day on the Ubuntu platform. The bleeding edge of Open Source technology is oft a perilous place to do business.
- danudey 12y ago
  I've been looking into MAAS for the simple task of 'put this customized Ubuntu instance on this server' and nothing beyond that. From your experience, would you say it would work for that? Or were the underlying fundamentals the problem?
  - kikoreis 12y ago
    That use case should work very well for a wide variety of hardware (and in fact I use it myself for a 20-node cluster). Issues may arise from networking and BMC unreliability, which the MAAS teams are currently working hard on addressing for this cycle.

gmb_uk 12y ago

Thanks for giving it a try. If you're ever thinking about trying it again, we (MAAS team) would be happy to help. Truth is that the problems that MAAS is trying to solve are hard, and it's taken us some time to solve them. We're spending a lot of time in this development cycle working on the robustness of the MAAS node lifecycle. MAAS 1.5 is significantly better than 1.3, and getting stronger all the time. Similarly, Juju 1.18 and 1.19 are leaps ahead of 1.13 – the local provider is now in a workable state and gets used a lot internally. We at Canonical eat our own dogfood as far as MAAS and Juju are concerned. We're using MAAS extensively in our DCs (though I don't think we use it for 100% of machines; I'm not privy to that knowledge) and the vast majority of our core services are deployed using Juju.

quantail 12y ago
Hey, thank you for developing it! There were a lot of cool working parts such as the Juju-gui and the way that nodes could be tagged for different charms. Though the way that charms deployed at the command line sometimes didn't appear in the gui vexed us. I like the idea of MaaS on the cloud in a box. A plug and play cloud has its uses though TechOps time is at a premium and rebuilding the stack unlikely. We ended up investing more time instead into Jenkins and gave up on the distributed computing issue by using 64 core, 512GB RAM servers.
Alupis 12y ago
Maybe Canonical should stick to their core... ...and focus on Linux on the Desktop... instead of trying to be an "Everything" company. Get the core down solid and making money, then expand into other markets.
- bratsche 12y ago
  There's no money in desktop now, though. Maybe they need to expand into markets where there is money in order to pay for desktop development.
  - Alupis 12y ago
    Well, that's not very true. I think you mean to say, "Desktop is not sexy". Most homes have either a desktop, or a laptop, or both, sometimes multiples of each. Every business has at least 1 computer (desktop or laptop, sometimes multiples of both). So there very much so is a lot of money still in desktop. Right now if you want to purchase a factory Linux computer, your choices are severely limited. It's either System76, or the Dell Sputnik (which for some reason costs more than it's Windows counterpart). XP just expired. My company has a warehouse of 40 workstations running XP. We're looking into getting new hardware. Guess what... it'll be Windows because there are not many other options to price-shop around and/or get differing levels of support. There is indeed money in Linux Desktop.

kikoreis 12y ago

Thanks for trying; here's a commentary on your points: > * Auto-enrollment of nodes was tough to get working. > * Overlay and config management was weak and better handled by Puppet. Though Juju beans were touted as able to handle this. If you have any detail to share on these I'd love to hear more. The first point has long been a sore point in MAAS and we're doing a lot of work this cycle to improve auto-registration and dealing with BMC hardware. > * Juju 1.13 and maas 1.3 do not support isolated juju environments in the same maas cluster. No idea what version it is at now. You can definitely do that now -- all you need to do is to set up separate users in MAAS and use different credentials for each of those. We've used this recently in the field for demonstrations (to take advantage of limited hardware) > * Juju charms "local provider" is potentially very compelling but wasn't in a workable state. This also works today (and can be used independently of MAAS) and as of 1.18 is in great shape; I'm personally supporting a few companies using it in production.

e12e 12y ago

On a somewhat related note, here's a couple of links I found when looking around for more info on maas and juju: Virtme: a very promising start to get a proof of concept up and running -- sadly it appears to be abandoned?: https://manage.jujucharms.com/~virtual-maasers/precise/virtme https://manage.jujucharms.com/~virtual-maasers/precise/virtm... http://javacruft.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/virtme/ http://javacruft.wordpress.com/2013/06/25/virtme/ A (partial) list of manual steps that try to achieve the same (with the goal of ending up with an openstack poc): http://www.teale.de/tealeg/computing/cloud/kvm_maas_juju_openstack.html http://www.teale.de/tealeg/computing/cloud/kvm_maas_juju_ope... YMMV etc.

tealeg 12y ago
As the author of the 2nd link there, I'd advise some caution, it's old and not complete, I will update it at some point soon when I have time to run through my whole process again.
sparkiegeek 12y ago
You should probably start with Juju docs on setting up an environment with MAAS as a "provider" https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/config-maas.html https://juju.ubuntu.com/docs/config-maas.html
- e12e 12y ago
  Good point -- I probably should've linked back to the official docs too -- they are very good.

ashayh 12y ago

Had the exact same experience. Established opensource tools like Foreman and Cobbler work much better.