Canonical's Metal as a Service treats physical machines like cloud instances: PXE-commission a pool of servers, inventory their hardware, then allocate the most appropriate machine on demand by constraints, deploy an OS in minutes, and release it back to the pool. The region/rack controller architecture, the machine lifecycle, allocation as a hardware scheduler, and why MAAS is the foundation layer that makes everything else in this series feel cloud-like — plus the honest cost of running it.
Provisioning
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MAAS: Bare-Metal as a Service -
Bare Metal Provisioning: PXE Boot, iPXE, and Fully Automated OS Installs A deep-dive into network booting and automated OS provisioning — covering the full PXE/iPXE boot chain, dnsmasq and TFTP setup, Ubuntu autoinstall, Debian preseed, Kickstart for Rocky Linux, cloud-init post-provisioning, and a complete Docker Compose provisioning stack that takes a server from blank to configured without touching a USB drive.