Canonical Targets OpenStack Deployments With Ubuntu 15.10

Canonical has released Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), a new version of its iconic software that delivers a number of incremental improvements for users and developers alike.

The latest version of the company’s open source operating system includes SDN tools to reduce need for expensive OpenStack cloud architects, as well as an OpenStack Autopilot to allow for the speedy build of an Ubuntu OpenStack cloud.

New Features

OpenStack Autopilot is described as an Ubuntu OpenStack cloud deployer and management tool. Its aim is to ease the deployment and management of Ubuntu OpenStack clouds, allowing them to scale “without the complexity and costs associated with major cloud projects.”

Autopilot deploys, manages and scales Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu OpenStack Kilo, and has been designed to support upgrades between releases.

“One of the biggest issues organisations using OpenStack face is how to scale their clouds in line with expansion without having to employ expensive cloud architects to manually re-design them,” said Shawn Madden, Autopilot product manager at Canonical.

“Autopilot offers enterprises a smart, way to scale their cloud technically and financially,” he added. “We have built Autopilot to deliver superior scale and economics in a simple to use package.”

OpenStack may once have been seen as the geeks’ playground but now there’s plenty of corporate interest these days. Indeed, according to a survey from the Linux Foundation Survey, Ubuntu is the most widely used cloud platform and Ubuntu OpenStack the most widely deployed OpenStack cloud distribution.

That said, BT recently said that it might abandon OpenStack for a propriety cloud network service to roll out its new virtual services.

But Canonical is working hard to make Ubuntu as attractive as possible to businesses and developers. To this it end it has included OpenStack Liberty, which it says has been built around three key themes of Manageability, Scalability and Extensibility.

To make it easier to manage there is common library adoption; improved configuration management; and more granular Neutron security settings with RBAC support. To aid scalability there is an initial version of Nova Cells V2 implementation to improve of single region large scale OpenStack clouds. Also included is Neutron, Nova and Cinder scale improvements.

Canonical says that for extensibility, there is support for OpenStack as the integration engine with ‘Big tent’ model of ancillary project identification. There is also support for containers with the debut of LXD nova driver to enable workloads to be deployed as LXC containers. And a first release of Magnum is included, with support for integration of Kubernetes, Swarm and Mesos.

On the server side is LXD, the machine container hypervisor that is now included by default within every Ubuntu server. Canonical says this means every Ubuntu Server can now host hundreds of other Linux guest containers. Beyond its usual hypervisor features, “LXD also provides an open, RESTful API, the network endpoint that any tool can use to start, stop, clone, and live migrate those containers.”

Earlier this year Canonical revealed it was getting into the embedded device market in a bid to help secure the Internet of things (IoT). It positioned Ubuntu to be relevant for embedded devices and IoT by taking advantage of the Snappy Ubuntu Core technology.

It already bundled in smartphone support when it shipped 13.10 (“Saucy Salamander”) back in 2013.

What do you know about Linux? Take our quiz!