Effective infrastructure automation to reduce data center costs

Data centers are expensive: automation is the solution

Today, managing a data center requires striking a balance between cost, security, and performance. Long-term costs are a different matter, even though upfront capital expenditures (CapEx) like real estate and hardware are well-known and reasonably predictable. According to industry surveys, operational expenses (OpEx), which include system provisioning, patching, compliance, and troubleshooting, steadily increase over time and frequently exceed 50% of total cost of ownership (TCO) by the third year.

This growing OpEx burden is complicated and involves more than just money. The more expansive and varied your infrastructure is, the more human labor it takes to maintain  security and functionality. These manual procedures are time-consuming, prone to mistakes, and are falling out of rhythm with the quick, scalable, and automated methods of public cloud providers.

It is becoming evident that traditional data center operations cannot be sustained without a new strategy, especially when you combine that with the increased demands for security and compliance. Whether you are a company running your own data center, a company selling Private Cloud services, or any other entity managing infrastructure, you must reevaluate how you conduct business in order to remain competitive. The key is to commoditize operations in order to reduce OpEx.

Reduce infrastructure OpEx by commoditizing operations

To truly reduce OpEx, you must shift your perspective from seeing operations as custom, artisanal work to one where operations are standardized, automated, and repeatable.  In other words, commoditized.

Commoditization means applying software engineering principles like version control, CI/CD, and abstraction to infrastructure. By doing so, you shift from manual tasks to policy-driven automation that works reliably at scale.

In that model, your infrastructure should:

• Provision hardware automatically via APIs
• Apply configurations consistently across environments
• Self-monitor and heal without human input
• Enforce security and compliance policies by default

With policy-driven automation, your infrastructure practically “runs itself” while your team concentrates on higher-value tasks.

Above all, commoditized operations are scalable and predictable. You avoid the high expenses of putting out fires, reduce your reliance on tribal knowledge and minimize human error. You gradually create a platform that is not only economical but also quick, safe, and flexible.

Matching the public cloud model

Public cloud providers have a distinct cost advantage, and it’s not just scale. Their secret sauce is radical automation. From provisioning to monitoring, remediation to upgrades, nearly every operational task is handled by software. Human intervention is minimized, ensuring that they can operate massive fleets of machines with minimal staff.

This efficiency is possible because these providers treat infrastructure, especially at the bare metal level, as programmable, ephemeral, and fully automated. Physical servers are provisioned, repurposed, and retired without human interaction. This reduces OpEx dramatically and ensures that every system is consistently configured, secure, and ready for use.

Private data centers can’t match the scale of hyperscalers, but they can adopt the same principles. The first step is recognizing that automation shouldn’t start at the VM or container layer: it must start at the metal. Without this, the rest of the stack inherits fragility, inefficiency, and manual bottlenecks.

Automation that only begins after the OS is installed or only covers cloud-like abstractions misses the foundational opportunity to cut costs and complexity at their root.

MAAS streamlines bare metal automation

Effective automation requires tools designed for physical infrastructure. Canonical MAAS (Metal-as-a-Service) was designed specifically to provide cloud-like agility to bare metal environments. It offers a cloud-like abstraction layer for operators to simplify bare metal management.

MAAS acts as a private cloud infrastructure provider, offering a programmatic interface and a well-defined machine lifecycle. With well-developed automations, this makes it easier to handle tasks like inventory management, OS installation, and server repurposing. 

As MAAS is operating system and hardware agnostic, it supports a variety of environments, including  operating systems like Windows, Linux, and VMware ESXi, as well as CPUs, GPUs, and DPUs from different vendors. This adaptability is essential for the sophisticated data centers of today.

Furthermore, MAAS enables effective machine lifecycle management, with tools that guide each machine from onboarding to retirement. This systematic approach streamlines operations and allows machines to be treated similarly to VMs. This unlocks the ability to quickly repurpose machines, allocate additional resources during peak times, and then power them down, resulting in cost savings and more sustainable data center operations.

This level of automation enables private data centers to:

• Reduce human intervention in operations
• Speed up environment setup and recovery
• Improve hardware utilization rates

In summary, MAAS empowers organizations to commoditize bare metal operations.

And how is MAAS used in practice? By handling the underlying bare metal provisioning, MAAS lays the foundation for Private Cloud platforms like OpenStack or MicroCloud. As a result, those platforms can focus exclusively on higher-level services like virtual machine management and network overlays. Similarly, workload orchestrators like Juju rely on MAAS as the bare metal infrastructure provider.

Another particularly powerful use case is running Kubernetes directly on bare metal. This method provides optimal performance, reduced latency, and a more straightforward architecture by doing away with the virtualisation layer. High-performance computing (HPC), telco workloads, and any use case where control and efficiency are crucial are particularly well-suited for MAAS.

Try MAAS and transform how you run infrastructure

The cost of running a data center is no longer just about the hardware you buy, it’s about how efficiently you operate it. As operational expenses overtake CapEx in the TCO, reducing manual intervention is critical. The key is infrastructure automation, starting where it matters most: at the bare metal layer.

By automating physical server provisioning and standardizing operations from the ground up, you can:

• Reduce labor costs and human error
• Increase infrastructure agility and reusability
• Ensure consistent security and compliance
• Compete more effectively with the cost efficiency of public clouds

Now is the time to rethink your data center strategy.

Start by identifying the most time-consuming operational tasks in your environment. Could they be automated? Are they tied to hardware provisioning or repetitive infrastructure setup? Chances are that the answer is yes, and they’re costing you more than they should.

Canonical MAAS empowers you to bring cloud-like capabilities to your on-prem infrastructure, whether you’re running a private cloud, deploying Kubernetes at scale, or supporting HPC or telco workloads. MAAS is open source and free to use. Test it out, read the documentation or get in touch with the Canonical team to see how MAAS can help you transform your data center with automated bare metal provisioning.

Further reading

• Canonical MAAS (Metal as a Service)
• Build a MAAS and LXD environment in 30 minutes with Multipass on Ubuntu
• MAAS documentation
• Kubernetes and cloud native operations report 2022