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What is Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS)?

Metal-as-a-Service turns a rack of physical servers into an API-driven pool. Here is when bare-metal provisioning matters and how ZCP delivers it.

ZSoftly Team
2 min read

Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) is the discipline of provisioning physical servers the same way cloud providers provision virtual machines: through an API, in minutes, with the OS installed and the network configured. No hypervisor in the path. No noisy neighbors. Bare hardware.

Two reference implementations define the category:

  • Canonical MAAS, open-source, uses PXE, IPMI, and Redfish to find and image machines on the network. Canonical positions MAAS as the “Day-0” provisioning layer underneath OpenStack and Kubernetes deployments.
  • OpenStack Ironic, originally a driver inside OpenStack Nova, now a standalone project managing the full lifecycle of physical nodes: enrollment, provisioning, maintenance, and decommissioning.

Both expose bare-metal hosts through a cloud-style API. The hypervisor layer is removed.

When MaaS makes sense

Most workloads run fine on virtual machines. MaaS earns its place in four specific situations:

  1. High-performance and HPC workloads. Virtualization adds latency and CPU overhead. For tightly coupled MPI jobs, low-latency trading, or large in-memory databases, bare metal removes the variance.
  2. GPUs. Training and inference clusters benefit from direct PCIe access to accelerators. Sharing a GPU host across tenants introduces driver, isolation, and scheduling complexity. Bare metal sidesteps this.
  3. License-bound software. Some commercial software (Oracle, certain SAP modules, legacy ISV products) is priced per physical socket or per core on the underlying host. Running on a virtualized public cloud either breaks the license or makes it prohibitively expensive.
  4. Dedicated tenancy and compliance. When a regulator, customer contract, or threat model requires physical isolation, MaaS gives you a host no other tenant touches. This also removes a class of side-channel attacks possible in shared-hypervisor environments.

A 2024 IEEE-published analysis of cloud service models notes bare-metal options are an increasingly common addition to IaaS catalogs because of these workload shapes.

How ZCP delivers MaaS today

We are direct here: ZCP does not currently offer pure self-serve MaaS through the portal. If you sign up tomorrow, you will get virtual machines on CloudStack and KVM, not a bare host.

What we do offer is the ZSoftly Private Cloud Build-Out. Starting at $4,500 setup plus $1,200/mo operations, our engineers handle:

  • Hardware procurement sized to your workload (CPU, RAM, GPU, NVMe).
  • Rack, cable, and network configuration in our data centers.
  • OS provisioning, hardening, and patching.
  • Ongoing operation: monitoring, capacity, hardware replacement.

In effect, you get the outcome of MaaS: dedicated physical servers running your workload, without standing up MAAS or Ironic yourself. For teams needing bare metal without a staffed hardware operations function, this is the right shape.

Self-serve MaaS is on our roadmap. Until it lands, the Build-Out path is how to get physical infrastructure on ZCP.

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