MAAS documentation
What is MAAS? MAAS (Metal as a Service) is Canonical’s private cloud infrastructure management system. It enables physical servers to behave like cloud instances: deploy, manage, and scale your infrastructure through automated, repeatable processes.
How does MAAS work? MAAS discovers your hardware and allows you to configure and deploy operating systems with API-driven workflows. It integrates tightly with DNS, DHCP, and image management, and supports complex networking and storage scenarios.
Who is MAAS for? MAAS is built for DevOps teams, system administrators, and data center architects — anyone provisioning bare-metal at scale.
Where does MAAS fit? Use MAAS to:
- Replace manual provisioning with repeatable, scriptable deployments.
- Build your own cloud foundation using Juju, Kubernetes, or OpenStack.
- Automate fast provisioning in telco, enterprise, and high-performance compute settings.
- Simplify testing pipelines with fast, disposable hardware labs.
In this documentation
| Tutorial Hands-on introduction to MAAS features |
How-to guides Step-by-step guides covering key operations |
| Explanation Detailed theory on the inner workings of MAAS |
Reference Technical specifications |
Project and community
MAAS is a member of the Ubuntu family. It is an open source project that warmly welcomes community projects, contributions, suggestions, fixes and constructive feedback.
- Read our code of conduct
- Get support
- Learn about MAAS performance
- Join our forum
- Contribute code
- Improve our documentation
- Request a feature
- Report a bug
Considering MAAS for your next project? Get in touch