Microsoft & Canonical demonstrate first fully automated OCP Deployment

Interesting news on the Open Compute Project (OCP) front this week as we extend our partnership with Microsoft to demonstrate the value of our Metal-as-a-Server (MAAS) deployment solution within an OCP environment. At this week’s OCP Summit, taking place in San Jose today and tomorrow (10th and 11th March), we will demonstrate how we’re working together to create scalable, OCP-compliant architecture. The aim? To make cloud OS deployment quick and easy for enterprises and telecoms companies.

Canonical is supporting bare-metal provisioning on Microsoft’s OCS hardware with our open source Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) deployment product. This support means Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, SUSE) operating systems, as well as application software on top, can be one-touch provisioned on OCS hardware.  At the summit, Canonical is demonstrating how to provision a multi-tier web architecture effectively, including content publishing and database to separate nodes in an OCS chassis.  This is the first showcase of automated deployment on OCP hardware, and displays the diverse mindshare OCS is capturing in the industry.

John Zannos, Vice President Cloud Alliances said: “Today’s announcement is an expansion of our partnership with Microsoft. Canonical is supporting the OCS hardware design with our ‘Metal as a Service’ (MAAS) deployment tools. We’re ushering in a new era of bare-metal provisioning power; present, for the first time, on Microsoft’s OCP-compliant OCS hardware.”

Kushagra Vaid, General Manager of Server Engineering for Microsoft’s Cloud & Enterprise division said: “We believe that OCS combined with MAAS from Canonical will drive enhanced IT efficiency. OCS delivers cost and power savings as well as cloud-scale computing learnings, while MAAS drives rapid deployment times and easier app lifecycle management. We’re excited for the possibilities this combination of technologies will bring to customers.”

This development  comes hot on the heels of recent announcements which have seen Docker on Ubuntu Server become available in the Azure Marketplace and Ubuntu become the dominant platform for Hadoop.

Microsoft will showcase a host of new developments in booth B2 at the Open Compute Project (OCP) U.S. Summit, California. Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Canonical is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s event.