Not Quite As Cool As It Sounds

Canonical, the corporate sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, has been doing a lot of interesting development work across a number of different computing segments: their on-going work with the Unity interface for Ubuntu, Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu for Android, and a whole lot more. Ubuntu, according to Canonical, is the world’s most popular OS for public, private, and hybrid clouds. Not content with being a tenant, Canonical is pushing to make Ubuntu the number one OS for running clouds, too. Similarly uncontent with existing descriptors like Platform-as-a-Service and Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Canonical is announcing their own Metal-as-a-Service.

The basic idea is that hardware is increasingly a commodity that you buy for what it offers, not what it is. In a cloud environment, you don’t in effect care too much about the technical details of your CPUs, or bus speeds, or memory channels. You want computational power, and storage, and networking. According to Canonical, MaaS is a way to abstract all the details of the physical computers into what you in fact care about.