Metal as a Service (MaaS) is a bare metal provisioning tool developed by Canonical. MaaS is an open source (AGPL v3 licence). The following diagrams visualize statuses and available actions for servers managed by MaaS.
Basic Statuses and Actions
Commissioning: adds node to a pool of available nodes.
Acquire: reserves a node for the user from the pool of available nodes. In CLI, it is required prior to deploying. In UI, it’s done automatically for the user.
Rescue Mode
Rescue Mode: boots a node ephemerally (Ubuntu running in memory on the underlying machine). This allows a user SSH to the machine for maintenance purposes. This can be done for a 'Deployed' or 'Broken' node as well as for a node that failed to deploy.
Abort, Delete, Mark Broken
Abort: aborts any action that can be retried. This currently applies to Commission and Deploy.
Delete: removes a node from MaaS. The underlying machine remains unaffected. Upon rebooting it will be enlisted once more (status 'New').
Mark broken: This can be chosen if any action has failed (such as 'Commission' and 'Deploy'). Marking it broken guarantees that the node will not get used in any way. This would normally be followed by some level of investigation so as to determine the source of the problem. This action can also be used to indicate that hardware maintenance is being, or will be, performed that would affect MaaS, such as modifications at the networking or disk subsystem level. Finally, some aspects of a node can only be edited when a node’s status is 'Broken'. For example, a node’s network interface can only be edited via MaaS if the node has a status of either 'Ready' or 'Broken'.
Read more about states and actions in the Concepts and Terms section of the official MaaS documentation.