This post was originally published in April 2017 on Superyesmore as part of their Human In The Machine series. Charles Dickens could easily have been talking about remote working here, rather than describing life during the French Revolution. If you’d have said to me earlier in my career that I could work from home for one of the world’s top open source companies, I’d have snapped your hand off, but in reality, as with most things, it’s not all hearts and flowers.

This post was also published on the Ubuntu blog in June 2017 Canonical’s MAAS is a bare metal provisioning and lifecycle management system. In this post, we’ll look at customising installs provisioned by MAAS to enable site specific configuration. Historically, the paradigm for bare metal machine installation has been to use a ‘golden master’ image, which contains in it all of the site specific customisation required for operations. This brings with it a lot of complexity around maintenance, since the images are fixed.

So in my previous post, we automatically deployed and configured an LXD host into our OpenStack public cloud tenancy, using only the native features of OpenStack and cloud-init. Let’s take a look at that instance and confirm everything is as it should be. Firstly we’ll need to assign some additional security rules to allow external access. By default most OpenStack clouds don’t allow any access, to give the user the most flexibility in defining their security goals.