The different email addresses seem to contain interesting classification. HRC16, HDR22 and HRC17 are some that jumped out. HRC1 & HRC2 must of been some particularly lofty circles.
Apologies for positing a supposition without knowing the facts.
To be clear we are a great fan of Canonical's work and it's too easy complain about the few issues that praise them for the great work that is done every day on the Ubuntu platform.
The bleeding edge of Open Source technology is oft a perilous place to do business.
There were a lot of cool working parts such as the Juju-gui and the way that nodes could be tagged for different charms. Though the way that charms deployed at the command line sometimes didn't appear in the gui vexed us.
I like the idea of MaaS on the cloud in a box. A plug and play cloud has its uses though TechOps time is at a premium and rebuilding the stack unlikely.
We ended up investing more time instead into Jenkins and gave up on the distributed computing issue by using 64 core, 512GB RAM servers.
Yeah, we were psyched to use it as a private cloud deployment tool and to manage some development environments. It represented a interesting middle ground between a container like setup (docker) and a distributed computing model like Storm/Disco.
A stack was run on it, however it lacked the polish, support and flexibility required to make it a platform worth investing in.
That is not to say that we thought the idea was bad but that it was nowhere near mature enough for production last year.
Given how Tahr has rolled out, we suspect most development effort was put into the mobile platform and a close integration of MaaS with the cloud in a box.