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.
- Reboot their machines, view the serial consoles -- aditionaly such management features may exist in the future.
A typical user workflow might look like:
- Reserve some machines.
- Create a logical "provisioning" network.
- Connect a NIC from each machine to the provisioning network. In particular, one could connect a NIC from which the machine will attempt to boot.
- Create a headnode, and attach it to the provisioning network
- Log in to the headnode, set up a PXE server, reboot the nodes, and deploy an operating system on them via the network.
See INSTALL.rst for details on setting up HaaS. You should also read docs/overview.md to get a sense of how HaaS operates. docs/apidesc.md describes the API at a conceptual level (enough to use it via the haas command line tool), and docs/rest_api.md provides a detailed mapping of that API to http requests.
This project is part of the larger Massachusetts Open Cloud, for a list of authors, description of the team, development workflow, etc. see:
https://github.com/CCI-MOC/moc-public/blob/master/README.md
The file HACKING.rst In this directory describes the technical details of running HaaS in development.
There is also some assorted documentation in the doc/ directory.