Introducing the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack

by Canonical on 28 October 2014

• The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack is the easiest way to create reference OpenStack clouds in minutes with full management, monitoring and scaling
• Will provide automated upgrades from today’s OpenStack Juno to future releases
• Freely available for small clouds, commercially supported by Canonical
• Now in public beta.

28th October, London: Canonical today announces the availability of the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack, which fully automates the creation of a reference OpenStack cloud from bare metal, building a fully managed private cloud in minutes.

Based on Canonical’s industry-leading OpenStack reference architecture and building on Ubuntu’s leading position as the most widely used OpenStack platform, the Canonical Distribution gives users the widest range of commercially-supported vendor options for storage, software-defined networking and hypervisor from Canonical and its OpenStack partners. It then automates the creation and management of a reference OpenStack based on those choices.

“The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack is a complete autopilot for your private cloud,” said Mark Shuttleworth. “Point it at a rack or ten and tell it your preferences for storage, software defined network, and hypervisor, and it will create your cloud automatically, manage and monitor it for you, keep it fully secure, and update it to the next version of OpenStack in due course. This is the solution for people who want a high-performance reference cloud and want to focus on their own applications and workloads rather than the underlying infrastructure.”

The Canonical Distribution starts with the industry-leading MAAS for physical hardware detection and provisioning, and Canonical’s Landscape for systems management. Adding machines to MAAS is a simple network boot, after which they can be allocated to Landscape for use in the cloud. MAAS supports the labelling of machines into physical isolation zones for high availability, and Landscape will eventually ensure the high availability of the cloud if it has sufficient hardware in multiple zones.

The Canonical Distribution includes a simple web-based UI in Landscape, which enables customers to choose the components they would like for their cloud, and only presents options that are compatible with existing infrastructure. Once the cloud is built, Landscape offers OpenStack-aware monitoring that tracks the health of running cloud environments and the continued availability of compute, storage and network resources. It also contributes to capacity planning with real-time predictions based on current utilisation trends, helping determine when it will be time to add new compute nodes or additional storage.

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack supports a range of vendor components for network, storage and compute, based on real-world interoperability testing at Canonical’s OpenStack Interoperability Lab (OIL), which on a continuous basis tests thousands of configurations of Ubuntu OpenStack built with third party hardware and software. As more solutions are proven in OIL they can be included as additional options in the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack, giving customers even wider flexibility in their choice of cloud components.

The Canonical Distribution helps enterprises realise the cost savings of private cloud by reducing the time spent on consulting, architecture, dedicated staff hours and operational processes for those cloud environments, concentrating valuable developer time on business tasks and workloads. “Private clouds will only be economically beneficial if they are as easy to deploy, manage and scale as Ubuntu itself, and with the Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack we have set a new standard in automation for OpenStack. We look forward to working with more vendors to support their OpenStack components, and are delighted with the feedback from private beta customers on the distribution to date” says Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

Federico Lucifredi, Canonical Product Manager for Ubuntu server comments; “The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack reduces the cost of experimenting with OpenStack to zero. Developers and operators can now rapidly evaluate different vendor technology combinations, quickly iterating their cloud design. Customers will learn more in a week with this tool than in months of manual exploration and consulting engagements.”

The Canonical Distribution of Ubuntu OpenStack is now available as a public beta, free for up to 10 physical and 10 virtual machines.

Availability:

To try Ubuntu OpenStack – The Canonical Distribution for free, go to ubuntu.com/download/cloud