Canonical has unveiled a Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) offering to provision and manage high-density Ubuntu microservers running hyper-scale computing centres and clouds.

Canonical claimed MaaS would allow administrators to set up and allocate thousands of tightly packed racks to different groups of users, adding the latest software without IT teams needing to physically visit each machine. MaaS will debut with the Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 2 and is scheduled to drop with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, due on 26 April.