HaaS

HaaS is a low-level tool for reserving physical machines and connecting them via isolated networks. It does not prescribe a particular method for imaging/managing said machines, allowing the user to use any solution of their choosing.

HaaS keeps track of available resources in a database, which a system administrator must populate initially.

This includes information such as:

• What machines are available
• What network interfaces they have
• Where those NICs are connected (what port on what switch)

From there, a regular user may:

• Reserve physical machines
• create isolated logical networks
• create "headnodes," which are small virtual machines usable for management/provisioning purposes
• connect network interfaces belonging to physical and/or headnodes to logical networks.

A typical user workflow might look like:

1. Reserve some machines.
2. Create a logical "provisioning" network.
3. Connect each machine's IPMI controller to said network.
4. Create a headnode, and attach it to the provisioning network
5. Log in to the headnode, and use IPMI to deploy some image/operating system onto the nodes.

This is only an example; mechanisms other than IPMI could be used for power cycling, booting, and provisioning machines.

HaaS is still in a very early alpha stage of development, and isn't production ready yet.

Hacking

This project is part of the larger Massachusetts Open Cloud, for list of authors, description of the team, workflow, ... look here

There's some assorted documentation in the doc/ directory.

Getting Started

The first time you start working in the repository, set up a clean test environment:

virtualenv .venv

Next, each time you start working, enter the environment:

source .venv/bin/activate

The first time you enter the environment, install the haas code and all its dependencies into the virtual environment:

pip install -e .

On systems with older versions of pip, such as Debian Wheezy and Ubuntu 12.04, this install will fail with the following error:

AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'skip_requirements_regex'

Fix this by upgrading pip within the virtual environment:

pip install --upgrade pip