Category: Canonical

Canonical and Amazon Web Services have been working closely together to create the best experience of the world’s most popular cloud OS, on the world’s most popular public cloud. Official Ubuntu guest images have been available on AWS for years, and underlie the majority of workloads on the service—whether you use the EC2 Quickstart, Marketplace, or Lightsail. This week, and for the first time on the public cloud, Canonical, in collaboration with Amazon, is delighted to announce the availability of an AWS-tuned Ubuntu kernel for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS release.

Thanks to our public cloud and kernel teams, as of March 29th, Ubuntu Cloud Images for Amazon have been enabled with the AWS-tuned Ubuntu kernel by default. The AWS-tuned Ubuntu kernel will receive the same level of support and security maintenance as all supported Ubuntu kernels for the duration of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

The kernel itself is provided by the linux-aws kernel package.  The most notable highlights for this kernel include:

• Up to 30% faster kernel boot speeds, on a 15% smaller kernel package
• Full support for Elastic Network Adapter (ENA), including the latest driver version 1.1.2, supporting up to 20 Gbps network speeds for ENA instance types (currently I3, P2, R4, X1, and m4.16xlarge)
• Improved i3 instance class support with NVMe storage disks under high IO load
• Increased I/O performance for i3 instances
• Improved instance initialization with NVMe backed storage disks
• Disabled CONFIG_NO_HZ_FULL to eliminate deadlocks on some instance types
• Resolved CPU throttling with AWS t2.micro instances

Any Ubuntu 16.04 LTS image brought up from EC2 Quickstart or AWS Marketplace on March 29th or later will be running on this AWS-tuned kernel. You can also query the EC2 API to confirm that these AMIs are ENA-enabled:

Instances using the AWS-tuned Ubuntu kernel will, of course, be supportable through Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage service, available for purchase on an hourly metered basis on the AWS-Marketplace (Standard or Advanced) tiers, or at an annual price on our Shop. The AWS-tuned Ubuntu kernel will not support the Canonical Livepatch Service at the time of this announcement, but investigation is underway to evaluate delivery of this service for users of the AWS-tuned Ubuntu kernel.

If, for now, you prefer stability over speed, you can get still get going with Livepatch by reverting to the old kernel, using the following commands:

Watch this space for more developments from Amazon and Canonical throughout the year, as we continue to optimize performance on a host of AWS services, and to make it easy to deploy and operate complex workloads in production.

In today’s software world, support is many times an afterthought or an expensive contract used only to keep-up with the latest patches, updates, and versions. Hidden costs to upgrade software, including downtime, scheduling, and planning are also factors that need to be considered. Canonical does not believe the traditional norms of support apply. Our leading support product Ubuntu Advantage (UA) is a professional support package that provides Ubuntu users with the backing needed to be successful.

As many of you have read on AWS Blog, this week at AWS’ Re:invent 2016 conference we announced the ability to purchase UA Virtual Guest via AWS marketplace. Ubuntu Advantage Virtual Guest is designed for virtualized enterprise workloads on AWS, which use official Ubuntu images. The tooling, technology, and expertise of UA is available via the AWS marketplace with just a few clicks. It includes:

• Access to Landscape (SaaS version), the system’s management tool for using Ubuntu at scale
• Canonical Livepatch Service, which allows users to apply critical kernel patches without rebooting on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS images using the Linux 4.4 kernel
• Up to 24×7 telephone and web support and the option of a dedicated Canonical support engineer
• Access to the Canonical Knowledge Hub and regular security bug fixes

Further, the added benefits of accessing Ubuntu Advantage through AWS Marketplace SaaS model are hourly pricing rates based on the quantity of customers actual Ubuntu usage on AWS, their SLA requirements, and centralized billing through users AWS Marketplace account. Customers pay for what they consume within their account, no more.

Innovation and leadership on display at Re:invent 2016

The ability to buy UA through the AWS Marketplace is just the beginning. At Re:invent we will be showcasing many of our solutions that support Big Software including:

Containers are changing how software is deployed and operated. Canonical is also actively innovating around containers with our machine container solution LXD, providing the density and efficiency of containers, but with the manageability and security of virtual machines; enhanced partnerships with partners like Docker, the CNCF and others around process container orchestration. Finally, our Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes provides a ‘pure K8s’ experience across any cloud.

Juju for service modeling and Charms to make software deployments painless. Juju is an open source service modeling platform that makes it easy to deploy and operate complex, interlinked, dynamic software stacks. Juju has hundreds of preconfigured services called Juju Charms available in the Juju store. For example, Juju makes it easy to stand-up and scale up or down Hadoop, Kubernetes, Ceph, MySQL, etc. all without disruption to the cloud environment.

Snaps for product interoperability and enablement. Snaps is a new packaging format used to securely bundle any software as an app, making updates and rollbacks simple. A snap is a fancy zip file containing an application together with its dependencies, and a description of how it should be safely run on your system, especially the different ways it should talk to other software. Most importantly snaps are secure, sandboxed, containerised applications isolated from the underlying system and from other applications. Snaps allow the safe installation of apps from any vendor on mission critical devices and desktops. Canonical’s Ubuntu Core is the leading open source Snap-enabled production operating system which powers anything from robots, drones, industrial IoT gateways, network equipment, digital signage, mobile base stations, refrigerators, and more.

Even as the cost of software has declined, the expense to operate today’s complex and distributed solutions have increased as many companies have found themselves managing these systems in a vacuum. Even for experts, deploying, and operating containers and Kubernetes at scale can be a daunting task. However, by deploying Ubuntu, Juju for software modeling, and Canonical’s Kubernetes distribution helps organizations to make deployment simplified. Further, we have certified our distribution of Kubernetes to work with most major public clouds as well as on-premise infrastructure like VMware or bare-metal Metal as a Service (MaaS) solutions thereby eliminating many of the integration and deployment headaches.

Most of these solutions can be used and deployed in production with your AWS EC2 credentials today. What’s more, they are supported with a professional SLAs from Canonical. We are also looking for innovative ISVs and forward thinking systems integrators to help us drive value for our customers and bring compelling solutions to market.

At AWS Re:invent 2016, we will be talking about all this and more at booth 2341 in Hall D.

Originally posted on the Ubuntu Insights blog. Reposted with permission.

Ubuntu has a long history in the cloud. Not only is it the world’s number one platform for deployments of OpenStack (as we’ve covered here), it also runs more public cloud workloads than all other platforms combined. Fast, secure, and proven in the most demanding production environments, it is extremely popular with the likes of Netflix, Waze, Airbnb, Uber, Heroku, and many others. Dustin Kirkland covered it brilliantly in his post last month.

Ubuntu is the choice of developers all over the world, and truly supports scale-out architecture. It is also a fully open-source operating system; in fact anyone can download an image from our public pages and even modify it, as long as it’s for their own use. So why be picky about which images you use on which public cloud?

Two of our values are especially relevant here:

1. Ensuring widespread community usefulness for Ubuntu
2. Building confidence that Ubuntu Just Works

For that, Ubuntu needs to provide a predictable, secure, and reliable user experience. When bad things happen, it can be annoying on your personal desktop, but when your project—and business—depends on reliable infrastructure, things need to run smoothly and efficiently at scale. Whether it’s an unforeseen incompatibility that requires extensive developer resource to fix, or a security vulnerability that’s hampering operations while you wait for a patch, the implications can often be measured in millions of dollars.

Certified images, developed and supported by Canonical, are managed centrally, delivered automatically, with bugs and vulnerabilities fixed fast. Here are the top reasons to ensure your workloads are running on certified images:

1. The best Ubuntu experience at all times, dependable, always up-to-date, and optimised for the leading public clouds
2. Consistency with your development and testing environments
3. Fast issue resolution and bug fixes, with rapid updates and software installation
4. 100% compatible with the cutting-edge Ubuntu cloud toolset, with an option for enterprise-grade Ubuntu Advantage support packages
5. A rich ecosystem of services at your fingertips

An enormous amount of work goes into creating and maintaining certified images, because it’s necessary to ensure that the best Ubuntu experience is available to everyone, through our cloud partners. With a truly stellar engineering team, a cutting-edge tool set and enterprise commercial support available direct from Canonical, there’s no better choice in the cloud.

So if you’re considering using the services of a public cloud provider who currently doesn’t offer Certified Ubuntu images, it’s worth raising the issue with them. Because in today’s competitive cloud world, you need all the advantages you can get.

If you’d like to read more, download our new ebook here.
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Originally posted on the Ubuntu Insights blog. Reposted with permission.