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:

1. Reserve some machines.
2. Create a logical "provisioning" network.
3. 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.
4. Create a headnode, and attach it to the provisioning network
5. Log in to the headnode, set up a PXE server, reboot the nodes, and deploy an operating system on them via the network.

• overview.md gives a sense as to how HaaS operates
• INSTALL.rst for details on setting up HaaS
• using.rst for details on using HaaS as a client
• apidesc.md describes the API at a conceptual level (enough to use it via the haas command line tool)
• rest_api.md provides a detailed mapping of that API to http requests.

Please note that we're in the middle of transitioning our documentation from Markdown to reStructured Text, since the latter of which is preferred by the python and OpenStack communities. As such, the documentation is currently a mix of the two.

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.