Official MAAS charm

Features
1

MAAS is often used in charmed deployments, and in BootStack we have developed a barebone charm to add monitoring to MAAS.

I think a proper, official MAAS charm would be a terrific addition to the charm ecosystem.

To avoid a sort of chicken and egg problem this could be a charm focused only (or only at first) on day 2 operations and monitoring (i.e. not support deploying MAAS).

I can see the following features as being extremely useful:

  • actions to restore postgres replication after a failover (or auto-healing)
  • easy integration with charmed observability stacks
  • proper integration with other charms (e.g. ntp)
  • actions to facilitate backups (and integration with backup charms like duplicity or juju-backup-all)
  • actions to facilitate upgrades
4 Likes
2

Hi, I see MAAS 3.2 has just been released and I’m very happy to see integration with modern observability stacks (i.e. the COS). The installation steps are however very manual, which in my opinion absolutely begs for automation via juju. A charmed MAAS would definitely make monitoring MAAS 3.2 a lot easier to manage.

3

Hi, I just made a quick search on charmhub and found Charmhub | Deploy MAAS Region Controller using Charmhub - The Open Operator Collection.

At first glance, it seems a great the idea but is still in an embryonic stage.

The features i wish to see in the region-controller:

  • easy HA: Charm configurations with:
    *vip - VIP for the MAAS-REGION HA with charm hacluster
    *os-hostname - hostname to be assigned to the VIP and later integration to vault charm for certificates issuence
    *vip_iface - interface to use to bind the vip on the charm container instance
    *[configurations do support external DB’s and integration to pgres db-router interface for charmed based postgres]

Actions wish list:

  • HA leadership selection / switchover

Relations:

  • easy relation to charm maas rack controller 1 with (DHCP range partition 1)
    …
  • easy relation to charm maas rack controller N with (DHCP range partition N)
    (unless currently maas rack controller charm is already transitioning or has plan to https://www.isc.org/kea/)

Since currently both charms for maas region controller and maas rack controller (channel=edge, rev=27) has no reference if they, by default, are clustering aware.

PS: (I’m sorry, I haven’t had time to try both charms at the moment.)

4

You might want to try GitHub - canonical/maas-anvil: A snap for managing charmed MAAS deployments.

5

Hi @manuel-paula

The charm you have discovered is indeed developed by MAAS team together with maas-agent charm, the charm that installs MAAS as rack controller. However, to be considered official, both of them have to be GA and we are not there yet. You can also observe that both charms neither have a stable channel nor are searchable on charmhub.

In the meantime, you can always experiment with what we push to GitHub - canonical/maas-charms: These charmed operators automate the operational procedures of running MAAS. but there is no official support and things are also changing fast.

As @r00ta suggested, you can also experiment with maas-anvil which will try to install charmed MAAS for you with sane configuration options. This project is again at an early stage with moving pieces but can already setup some things for you like haproxy in front of MAAS with a VIP and soon TLS. No official support too.

As for your suggestions, they are more than welcome. If you want to go further with experiments and you find issues worth reporting you can always open a GH issue to charm or anvil repos.

Best,
Stamatis