Announcing MAAS 2.9 Final!

Hello, MAAS users! We are pleased to announce the release of the MAAS 2.9 Final. 2.9 is now the default Snap track.

You can install the Debian packages from the MAAS 2.9 PPA on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maas/2.9
sudo apt-get -y install maas

Or install the Snap with

sudo snap install --channel=2.9/stable maas

Release notes.

Please be sure to file any bugs you may find.

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\o/

Just one thing : in the release notes, the anchors in the headings are not working, you can click but it goes nowhere.

great news!

is it possible to upgrade snap from 2.8? did not see in the instructions…

never mind it is here: https://maas.io/docs/snap/2.9/ui/installation#heading--upgrade-maas-snap

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Very nice! We upgraded from 2.6 to 2.9 (via the intermediate releases) this weekend, and it’s a really big improvement!

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thanks very much, @nturner! the feedback is useful and welcome.

just out of curiosity, what are the biggest improvements you noticed after the upgrade? the more we know, the more we can potentially focus our efforts.

My hot take on 2.9, purely from a feature slate POV:

  • I’m happy that I am able to deploy focal for KVM nodes now
  • The UI exposing cloud-init user data inclusion for deployment is great - where previously this was simply hard-coded to point at another tool’s orchestration script, I’m now offered the convenience and additional flexibility of being able to use cloud-init directly

For the future my focus is around:

  • Migrating away from virsh onto LXD
  • Revisiting the relationship between MAAS, Juju and LXD and looking for ways to make them more synergistic (and mourning the death of the Juju composition GUI)
  • something something Kubernetes

(Rambling off-topic grumble follows)

I guess I’m doing things that aren’t regular use-cases (stateful workloads on diverse hardware) so I’ll never be satisfied here, but seeing MAAS slowly adding functionality to the UI either by exposing cli functions or through embracing actions that make the UI uniquely powerful, is wonderful to me.

Watching Juju seemingly back away from the same thing through abandonment of the composition UI and focus on the monitoring stack gives me cause to again look around for something else for what MAAS/Juju/LXD together represented to me as a bright future, but is being dropped in favor of solving (yet) another already solved problem related to specific Kubernetes ops.

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@billwear, overall everything seems faster and more polished. In particular the time to “cold” load the UI is hugely improved, and the KVM management UI (which is a huge time saver for us) and the machine details view seem to have lots of nice improvements.

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@nturner, thanks, glad to hear that. we really appreciate the feedback.

The APT repository has no packages for upgrade version 2.8 to 2.9.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:maas/2.9

Does anyone know when MaaS will release the APT files to upgrade to 2.9?

@djairdasilva, you have to upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubnutu 20.04 LTS to upgrade to MAAS 2.9. A set of instructions can be found at https://maas.io/docs/deb/2.9/ui/installation. If you have trouble with these, please let me know.

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That is nice! Thank you so much @billwear.

Kind Regards,

Hi mister @billwear I did the upgrade Ubuntu to 20 and maas was upgrade also.

Via Snap I’m able to install maas 2.8 on Ubuntu 18. Does maas apt installations will be only available for Ubuntu 20?

I would like also to know if someone can share a guide about how to migrate from APT installation to Snap, I did try to do that only removing and pointing the file region.conf to the database but it did not work.

Thanks,

@djairdasilva, we are in the process of coming up with a support matrix, but here is the short version:

MAAS 2.7, 2.8 Debian packages will run on Ubuntu 18.04 and 20.04.
MAAS 2.9 Debian packages run on Ubuntu 20.04, but not Ubuntu 18.04 or lower.

does that help?

i’ll make a note to point you toward our support matrix when we are able to publish it.

Thanks mister @billwear .

All clear to me now.
Thanks for clarifying.

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@djairdasilva, no problem. happy to help! ping me if you need more info.

Can I upgrade from 2.7 (snap) directly to 2.9 or do I have to go via 2.8 ?

@glasse, normal procedure would be to switch between each major channel, so go via 2.8, i.e., 2.7 -> 2.8 -> 2.9. We usually end up having transitional versions, so snaps have different epochs. A straight 2.7->2.9 might not find any upgrade version.

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