When was the last time you dealt with bare metal hardware? That dusty machine that has not yet been migrated to the cloud will always receive special treatment. If it crashes or a service fails, all hell breaks loose.
In this talk I'll give you a quick overview of Metal as a Service (MAAS). MAAS's dedicated goal is to consume bare metal machines the same way you consume VMs from a cloud. This also requires a mindset shift: treat machines like cattle with reproducible deployments, not like pets. I'll show you how this can be done in a homelab and how it looks at scale when running hundreds of machines across multiple racks.
Finally I'll spend a few minutes on how dogfooding and mandating SRE practices advanced our engineering team, and how we try to balance improving our own products through dogfooding while staying unblocked to innovate.
Thorsten is an Engineering Manager at Canonical leading distributed international teams of back-end and front-end developers in Canonical's Metal as a Service (MAAS) team. Before that he co-founded sustainabill (now Verso Supply Chain Hub), a cloud platform for supply chain transparency and traceability for physical goods. He did his PhD at the intersection of software engineering, requirements engineering, and machine learning, all these disciplines remain as important for his day to day work today as they were 10 years ago.
