A year in the Cloud

The Ubuntu Cloud Zeitgeist: a year in retrospective

The new year is a perfect occasion to reflect on the road we just covered and how far we have come just in this past year.

We opened 2014 shipping the new Ubuntu Server 14.04 on April 17, our third LTS release designed for the cloud.  Including five years of support for OpenStack Ice House, it was shown time and again to be the most popular OS platform for OpenStack. We did not stop there: alongside a major set of improvements we included Docker, arguably the hottest cloud infrastructure technology available today – and one where Ubuntu is six times as popular a platform as the runner up.  Not satisfied with that milestone, the Server team saw a million Vagrant installs in under nine months. Key author and OpenStack Community leader Kevin Jackson remarked:

Ubuntu has helped establish OpenStack as the leading open cloud platform today and the Ubuntu Cloud Archive is the default way for many to get the latest stable release of OpenStack

But being the cloud platform of choice was not enough, and continuing our tradition of leadership in the container space with Google and Parallels,  the team rounded up the year with the announcement of the LXD container hypervisor, and demonstrating container live migration at the OpenStack summit in Paris, as well as porting the Snappy technology from Ubuntu Phone to the cloud, with the announcement of Ubuntu Core in December.

Live on a stage in front of the 4,000 Stackers assembled, Mark Shuttleworth demonstrated streamlined installing of OpenStack using an early release of the OpenStack Autopilot at the Atlanta summit, where we also learned that five out of the six featured Superusers are running Ubuntu. The OpenStack Autopilot moved into public beta as part of Landscape later in the fall, effectively dropping the cost of experimenting with OpenStack to zero, as you can now deploy a full best-practice OpenStack cloud during your lunch break – and do it twice if you hurry.  Encoding the best practices of Canonical’s consulting team into a programmatic architect, the Autopilot sets a new standard in OpenStack automation and  made SJVN comment:

Today, you know Canonical best for its Ubuntu Linux distribution. Tomorrow you may know it best for its OpenStack cloud distribution.

Certified Public Cloud confirmed its position as the company’s fastest growing commercial program, maintaining relationships with all our strategic partners including Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure to bring a reliable, fast and supported Ubuntu experience to customers on the world’s largest public clouds. Doubling partners in the past year, the Public Cloud Program welcomed its first European partners in BrightBox and CloudSigma, and welcomed Google to the raucous applause of those assembled at Google Cloud Platform Live in early November.   The team was in attendance at Amazon re:Invent later that month, and we let them do the talking in the featured video.

We are just getting started. Join us in the year ahead!