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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.