Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has announced a new tool called Metal as a Service (MAAS) that is designed to simplify the provisioning of individual server nodes in a cluster. It primarily targets computing environments that have many physical servers.

MAAS supports installing an Ubuntu Server image on computers over the network. It relies on PXE for that purpose, much like similar open source provisioning tools such as Cobbler. A simple Web-based administrative interface is provided for managing nodes. MAAS is implemented with Python and Django and is distributed as open source under the Affero General Public License (AGPL).

MAAS is intended to complement Juju, Canonical's service orchestration framework. Juju works a little bit like a package management system: administrators use Juju recipes (which are called Charms) to automatically deploy and configure various server software stacks. Juju integrates with MAAS, making it possible to centrally deploy software to the nodes in a MAAS cluster.

Using MAAS and Juju together can significantly reduce the difficulty of bringing up an Ubuntu-based private cloud. A system administrator can use MAAS to provision nodes and then use Juju to populate those nodes with complete software configurations for things like OpenStack or Hadoop.

Canonical is best known for its desktop Linux product, but the company has worked hard to convince potential adopters that Ubuntu is also a credible choice for servers. The availability of updates at no cost has helped to drive Ubuntu server growth over the past few years, but it still faces an uphill battle competing with Red Hat's highly successful Linux distribution. Canonical's strong focus on the cloud is one way that the company is working to differentiate Ubuntu as a Linux server platform.

For more details about MAAS, you can refer to Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth's blog post about the new project. The source code is available from Canonical's Launchpad project hosting service. MAAS is planned for inclusion in Ubuntu 12.04, an upcoming long-term support release that will arrive at the end of the month.