M2: Malleable Metal as a Service

TL;DR

M2 is a new bare-metal cloud service that uses network-mounted boot drives to significantly improve provisioning speed, scalability, and flexibility over traditional systems, while maintaining performance.

Contribution

This paper introduces M2, a novel bare-metal cloud architecture utilizing network-mounted drives to enhance provisioning speed and resource management.

Findings

Reduces provisioning time by over 50%

Offers richer functionality than existing systems

Maintains comparable run-time performance

Abstract

Existing bare-metal cloud services that provide users with physical nodes have a number of serious disadvantage over their virtual alternatives, including slow provisioning times, difficulty for users to release nodes and then reuse them to handle changes in demand, and poor tolerance to failures. We introduce M2, a bare-metal cloud service that uses network-mounted boot drives to overcome these disadvantages. We describe the architecture and implementation of M2 and compare its agility, scalability, and performance to existing systems. We show that M2 can reduce provisioning time by over 50% while offering richer functionality, and comparable run-time performance with respect to tools that provision images into local disks. M2 is open source and available at https://github.com/CCI-MOC/ims.