{"id":1760,"date":"2014-11-24T19:00:59","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T17:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cloudbase.it\/?p=1760"},"modified":"2017-06-30T13:00:57","modified_gmt":"2017-06-30T10:00:57","slug":"rebot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudbase.it\/rebot\/","title":{"rendered":"reBot \u2013 using Lego for bare metal deployments on Intel NUCs"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here at Cloudbase, we use a lot of Intel Next Unit of Computing (NUC)<\/a> for our internal testing and development work. The NUC is a small form factor computer, designed and manufactured by Intel, very compact and powerful, sporting a Haswell i5 processor, up to 16 GB of RAM and a\u00a0mSATA SSD.<\/p>\n

You can see our NUC tempest\u00a0testing\u00a0rig in action here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What those NUCs are lacking (except for a single older model, as of today) is the ability to power them on and off remotely, like higher grade servers do with\u00a0technologies like\u00a0<\/span>IPMI<\/a>, AMT<\/a>, iLO<\/a>. Unfortunately,\u00a0the NUCs don’t have any of those, so we invented\u00a0our own to have some fun. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

Lego to the rescue<\/h3>\n

Since we had a lot of Lego<\/a> just lying around, we though, why not building a Lego Mindstorms<\/a> robot to remotely push the NUC power button?<\/p>\n

After a bunch of prototypes, we came out with this:<\/p>\n

\"reBot<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

We call it reBot<\/h3>\n

Our first implementation of reBot was for Ubuntu Metal as a Service (MAAS)<\/a>. MAAS is the bare-metal deployment service for Ubuntu, which spins physical\u00a0machines up just like virtual machines in OpenStack. I won’t go into the details of how\u00a0MAAS & Juju work, but\u00a0you can read more about our Windows implementation\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Right now we also have a working proof-of-concept power adapter for OpenStack Ironic<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This is how a 4-node reBot MAAS setup is deploying a full OpenStack bare-metal\u00a0cloud, all unattended:<\/p>\n