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. 1 Previous provisioning systems exploited remote storage in special purpose environments, like HPC clusters, where all nodes boot the same kernel.2 As the focus of this work is to improve the provisioning time M2 only network-mounts boot drives that hosts the OS and applications. Data drives are still hosted on the local disks.

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