User:Alexandru.bordei/sandbox

Overview
In computing, Bare-Metal-as-a-Service Software or BMaaS Software is a type of Software for implementing a variant of Infrastructure as a Service service, often called "Bare Metal Cloud", either for commercial use or private use by deploying it on-premises. It refers to offering bare metal infrastructure (servers, storage, network) with a cloud-like consumption model, without the use of virtualization. It is an implementation if the Converged Infrastructure concept. This class of software is becoming increasingly used for Edge Computing.

Users (or Tenants) of a BMaaS service would deploy their own dedicated infrastructures, isolated from a security perspective and would be able to deploy their own hypervizors or operating systems as well as link servers with layer 2 and layer 3 networks and attaching SAN storage.

The software is also called ""Bare Metal Virtualization"" (not to be confused with Virtualization) which allows the consumption of physical resources from a common pool of resources but without using a hypervisor. This is typically accomplished by coordinating the provisioning of Servers, Storage arrays and Network Switches or by using specialized hardware such as DPUs.

Comparison with Composable infrastructure
It is similar to Composable disaggregated infrastructure in that it offers the user the ability to request a specific set of resources (such as Compute and Storage) with the distinction that the storage and compute need not be dissagregated. The User can be allocated one of servers from the pool that matches the required characteristics such as: RAM, CPU Cores, Disk capacity, GPU, FPGA, SmartNICs etc. In some implementations, storage external to the system, such as one exposed by iSCSI can also be consumed along with the main compute resource.

Use in datacenter modernization
BMaaS software typically takes over the lifecycle management of the equipment in a datacenter (Compute, Storage and Network Switches, Firewalls, Loadbalancers and others. It enables datacenter operators to offload much of the manual work typically associated with deploying hardware. It also reduces waste by simplifying reuse and increases security by implementing automatic cleanup and automatic segmentation between tenants at the network level. Increasingly BMaaS software is used internally to reduce the costs associated with lifecycle management of equipment at scale . Enterprises that have large fleets of servers and many datacenters aim to benefit from fully automating hardware in order to reduce time to market, improve SLAs, reduce human error and reduce operational costs.

Use in Bare Metal Cloud offerings
This type of software is used by cloud service providers to build their commercial "Bare Metal Cloud" offerings. Well known commercial offerings of Bare Metal Clouds are offered by **Equinix Metal (former Packet)**, **OVHCloud**,**INAP**, **Bigstep** and others. Note that the distinction between these services and the traditional dedicated server offerings is the user's ability to provision infrastructures composed out of multiple servers, a complex network and storage setup rather than servers in isolation.

Comparison with Virtualized private cloud solutions
BMaaS software aims to simplify hardware management and enable its as-a-service consumption. It handles primarily the layer below a hyper-converged or container-based solution. It often collaborates with the layers above through integrations such as the Kubernetes cluster autoscaler and it also provisions the layers above.

Use in Edge computing
Due to the scale of deployments, full automation is used to remotely deploy both hardware and software. BMaaS software is often used to deploy the hardware part of the edge nodes and edge network.

History
One of the forefathers of bare metal provisioning is Cobbler_(software) that appeared in the 1990s and was using the Preboot Execution Environment (PXE) protocol. Since then various cloud providers have been building their own in-house stacks in order to offer variants of dedicated servers or bare metal cloud offerings such as: for $335 million.
 * April 2015 OpenStack Ironic component was launched as part of the Kilo release.
 * March 2020, Equinix acquired bare metal cloud provider Packet
 * May 2020 Packet released a part of their stack as Tinkerbell
 * June 2020 MetalSoft was launched to commercialize the Stack behind Bigstep Cloud.

Examples
Examples of BMaaS Software both open-source and commercial:
 * OpenStack Ironic (Open Source)
 * Canonical_(company) MaaS (Open Source)
 * MetalSoft (Commercial)
 * RackN DigitalRebar (Commercial)
 * Tinkerbell (OpenSource)
 * xCAT (OpenSource)
 * RackHD (OpenSource)
 * Cobbler (OpenSource)
 * Foreman (OpenSource)
 * Puppet Labs Razor (Commercial)