Canonical and Chef – an automation, cloud computing, and DevOps company – join forces to offer cloud users with the capability to deploy bare metal machines with plenty of operating system (OS) variants to choose from in their data center or cloud environments. The deal brings together Canonical’s Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) and Chef’s automation platform. This integration will enable users to automate bare metal compute orchestration in the data center where they can provision, configure, and deploy their bare metal computer resources. Also in the deal is the agreement where Chef 12 server will be distributed with future versions of Ubuntu that further drives automation and public and private cloud orchestration. Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, SuSE, and Windows OS will be available for users who wish to build bare metal infrastructure in their in-house or private/hybrid cloud environment. MAAS Metal as a Service from Canonical – the company behind the popular open source os Ubuntu – lets users provision their servers dynamically through a simple web interface. The platform offers tremendous amount of flexibility as servers can be added, commissioned, updated and recycled on an ad hoc basis. It works with Juju – a service orchestration tool – for faster, reliable, repeatable, and scalable deployment of services. "Chef and Ubuntu are often inseparable in serious server deployments, making mutual integration a must for our users. We're excited to offer Chef as part of the Ubuntu distribution and to deliver easy bare metal provisioning with MAAS and Chef," Mark Shuttleworth, Founder, Canonical, reports Marketwired. Canonical will be providing Tier One and Tier Two support for all Chef deployments within its user base.