Cloud Computing on Ubuntu

By Dawn M. Foster (84 posts) on November 3, 2009 at 8:00 am

Last week, I talked about Red Hat's and Novell's cloud computing strategies, and now Ubuntu's latest server release is focused on cloud computing.

Canonical announced the availability of Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition, which includes Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) powered by software from Eucalyptus Systems. What makes this particularly interesting is that the technology is based on the Amazon EC2 APIs allowing companies to easily deploy their solution in a private cloud within their internal IT infrastructure or externally on Amazon EC2.

Steve George, Canonical's director of support and services, recently told Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols that "People who have been exploring cloud computing have really only be able to use public clouds. UEC allows companies to build a cloud internally first, and then think about how to make use of public clouds like EC2."

They also made a special effort to create an image that works both on KVM (Ubuntu's preferred virtual environment) and Xen (the virtualization solution used on Amazon EC2). In an interview with CNET's Stephen Shankland, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical Founder and CEO, said: "It's possible to build one machine image which works in both places. We went to a lot of trouble to make a version for 9.10 that works on EC2."

It is nice to see Ubuntu providing a flexible cloud computing solution for their customers. Companies need this kind of flexibility to easily move between internal, private cloud solutions and cloud solutions using heavy duty, scalable architectures like Amazon EC2 based on their changing business needs.

You can learn more about Canonical's cloud computing strategy in this video from the Intel Developer Forum.

Categories: Open Source

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