Canonical and AWS partner to deliver world-class support in the cloud

In today’s software world, support is many times an afterthought or an expensive contract used only to keep-up with the latest patches, updates, and versions. Hidden costs to upgrade software, including downtime, scheduling, and planning are also factors that need to be considered. Canonical does not believe the traditional norms of support apply. Our leading support product Ubuntu Advantage (UA) is a professional support package that provides Ubuntu users with the backing needed to be successful.

As many of you have read on AWS Blog, this week at AWS’ Re:invent 2016 conference we announced the ability to purchase UA Virtual Guest via AWS marketplace. Ubuntu Advantage Virtual Guest is designed for virtualized enterprise workloads on AWS, which use official Ubuntu images. The tooling, technology, and expertise of UA is available via the AWS marketplace with just a few clicks. It includes:

• Access to Landscape (SaaS version), the system’s management tool for using Ubuntu at scale
• Canonical Livepatch Service, which allows users to apply critical kernel patches without rebooting on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS images using the Linux 4.4 kernel
• Up to 24×7 telephone and web support and the option of a dedicated Canonical support engineer
• Access to the Canonical Knowledge Hub and regular security bug fixes

Further, the added benefits of accessing Ubuntu Advantage through AWS Marketplace SaaS model are hourly pricing rates based on the quantity of customers actual Ubuntu usage on AWS, their SLA requirements, and centralized billing through users AWS Marketplace account. Customers pay for what they consume within their account, no more.

Innovation and leadership on display at Re:invent 2016

The ability to buy UA through the AWS Marketplace is just the beginning. At Re:invent we will be showcasing many of our solutions that support Big Software including:

Containers are changing how software is deployed and operated. Canonical is also actively innovating around containers with our machine container solution LXD, providing the density and efficiency of containers, but with the manageability and security of virtual machines; enhanced partnerships with partners like Docker, the CNCF and others around process container orchestration. Finally, our Canonical Distribution of Kubernetes provides a ‘pure K8s’ experience across any cloud.

Juju for service modeling and Charms to make software deployments painless. Juju is an open source service modeling platform that makes it easy to deploy and operate complex, interlinked, dynamic software stacks. Juju has hundreds of preconfigured services called Juju Charms available in the Juju store. For example, Juju makes it easy to stand-up and scale up or down Hadoop, Kubernetes, Ceph, MySQL, etc. all without disruption to the cloud environment.

Snaps for product interoperability and enablement. Snaps is a new packaging format used to securely bundle any software as an app, making updates and rollbacks simple. A snap is a fancy zip file containing an application together with its dependencies, and a description of how it should be safely run on your system, especially the different ways it should talk to other software. Most importantly snaps are secure, sandboxed, containerised applications isolated from the underlying system and from other applications. Snaps allow the safe installation of apps from any vendor on mission critical devices and desktops. Canonical’s Ubuntu Core is the leading open source Snap-enabled production operating system which powers anything from robots, drones, industrial IoT gateways, network equipment, digital signage, mobile base stations, refrigerators, and more.

Even as the cost of software has declined, the expense to operate today’s complex and distributed solutions have increased as many companies have found themselves managing these systems in a vacuum. Even for experts, deploying, and operating containers and Kubernetes at scale can be a daunting task. However, by deploying Ubuntu, Juju for software modeling, and Canonical’s Kubernetes distribution helps organizations to make deployment simplified. Further, we have certified our distribution of Kubernetes to work with most major public clouds as well as on-premise infrastructure like VMware or bare-metal Metal as a Service (MaaS) solutions thereby eliminating many of the integration and deployment headaches.

Most of these solutions can be used and deployed in production with your AWS EC2 credentials today. What’s more, they are supported with a professional SLAs from Canonical. We are also looking for innovative ISVs and forward thinking systems integrators to help us drive value for our customers and bring compelling solutions to market.

At AWS Re:invent 2016, we will be talking about all this and more at booth 2341 in Hall D.