Ten Vulnerabilities that Impact Enterprise Cloud Apps
Today Canonical made available upgrades to its Ubuntu distribution of Linux, which adds support for both Docker containers and the open source Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment alongside the latest release of the OpenStack cloud management framework.
Mark Baker, cloud and server product manager for Canonical, says that with so many IT organizations now weighing their future platform options against advances in open source technologies higher up the stack, Canonical sees a significant opportunity to usurp other distributions of Linux and Windows Server.
As part of that effort, release 14.10 of Ubuntu Cloud includes an upgrade to the company’s Metal-as-a-Service (MAAS) provisioning tool, which has now been extended to support multiple operating systems, including Windows Server/Hyper-V, CentOS and openSUSE. Baker says that provisioning tools, alongside the company’s Juju orchestration software, are both keys to making it easier to deploy Ubuntu with other distributions of Linux and Windows Server.
With this release of Ubuntu, Juju has been extend to provide a view of workloads running on physical and virtual machines and to enable the management of workloads running on Linux distributions and Windows Server.
In addition to upgrading Ubuntu server, Canonical has upgraded the Ubuntu desktop. Among other features, Ubuntu 14.10 Desktop adds support for Ubuntu Developer Tools Centre, which downloads all the Android toolkits and their dependencies and integrates them with an Ubuntu launcher.
As a provider of a Linux distribution that runs on multiple platforms, Canonical has begun to gain a fair amount of traction in the enterprise. It’s still far from being a dominant player, but with so many things up in the air inside the data center, Ubuntu is now being considered as a viable alternative platform around which next-generation data center environments can be built.
