I’ve been in Taiwan for the last week and a half working with a customer on a proof of concept solution. All that time was spent setting up and tearing down and rebuilding a fully HA OpenStack Icehouse deployment using Juju and MAAS and Ubuntu 14.04. But the highlight of the week is one of the coolest things we have done in a while.
So you have the background, what I’m about to describe uses the three biggest tools that Canonical produces for the server space. MAAS, Metal-As-A-Service is a bare metal management system that handles provisioning of Ubuntu (and other OSes) in a quick and repeatable way on bare metal, 
be that on traditional servers or the newer scale-out density server systems like the SeaMicro SM15000, HP Moonshot, and similar.
The next piece is Juju. Juju does for software what MAAS does for hardware. It’s a service orchestration tool that allows you to rapidly deploy services like Hadoop, LAMP stacks, OpenStack, Nagios, OpenVSwitch and pretty much anything you can imagine. And even better, with Juju you can deploy these services just about anywhere you’d want to, from AWS to Azure to Digital Ocean, on Virtual Machines, on a single machine, anywhere in LXC or in this case, to bare metal using MAAS as the provisioning system.
The final piece of puzzle is Canonical’s datacenter management tool called Landscape. Landscape provides a means to manage all your hardware in one location, handling system updates, security alerts, users and so forth. And now, it provides a means to very, VERY easily deploy OpenStack, a task that is not at all trivial.
Recently, Canonical announced The Canonical Distribution of Openstack. This is our way of giving you a cloud, on your hardware, in the easiest way you can imagine. The first time I saw this work, sitting at UTSA to set up a demo for the OpenCompute Summit in Paris, I felt giddy and thought, “This is fucking cool.” And it is.
Using Landscape, MAAS and Juju, we have reduced an OpenStack deployment to a few mouse clicks. Once you have MAAS configured and hardware commissioned and ready to roll, you install Landscape using our openstack-installer tool. After that, getting OpenStack running is simply a matter of registering the MAAS server so Landscape knows about the hardware, choosing a few options and away you go.
For now, it’s in Public Beta and the options are limited but more are scheduled and coming in the near future. In essence, if you can plug it into an OpenStack deployment, we want you to be able to do so as easily and smoothly as possible. Currently, the only hypervisor is KVM though support for other hypervisors is planned. For networking, OpenVSwitch is the way we roll. Object storage is provided by one of either Ceph or Swift and Block Storage is provided by either Ceph or Cinder (via iSCSI). Once you’ve selected your components, you simply need to select the hardware you want to deploy.
For Hardware, you need a minimum of 5 registered systems in MAAS, which need 2 hard drives each and one of which needs to have two NICs on valid networks. The 2-NIC system is used for Quantum Gateway. The second hard disk in each node is used for the Ceph or Swift storage clusters. Once you’ve selected your hardware, you simply click “Install” and wait.
Landscape will give you a status/progress report and when it’s done it will show you your new Cloud, give you the URL and access credentials for the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon) as well as the openstack credentials (private key). From there you can log into the dashboard, create an instance (it downloads Ubuntu 14.04 and 12.04 by default, but you can add any cloud image you want via Glance) and you’re in business.
And all that, from the time you click Install to the time you log into the Dashboard, takes less than 75 minutes. And that time was on a system with small 2.5″ hard drives spinning at 5400 RPM. On a system with pure SSD storage, it would be a whole lot faster. Use a local mirror of the Ubuntu archives rather than the internet and the speed increases even more.
So there we sat, walking a Vice President through 6 or 7 mouse clicks to a full OpenStack Juno deployment and yeah, it was that fucking cool.
