Metal-as-a-Service (MASS) is a provisioning construct created by Canonical, developers of the Ubuntu Linux-based operating system. MAAS is designed to help facilitate and automate the deployment and dynamic provisioning of hyperscale computing environments such as big data workloads and cloud services.
MAAS serves as a layer underneath Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and works with Juju to coordinate applications and workloads, deploying hardware and services that can dynamically scale up and down. Metal-as-a-Service is currently featured in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and is summarized by Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth as a provisioning tool for bringing “cloud semantics to the bare metal world.”
