Canonical’s Openstack Autopilot dramatically reduces cloud costs

• Fully automated bare-metal OpenStack deployment and operations tool
• Intelligent hardware mapping optimises scale-out cloud architecture for cluster
• Containerised deployment eases administration and scaling
• Eliminates need for OpenStack expertise or consulting

London, 17 November 2015. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, today announced the general availability of its OpenStack Autopilot – the easiest way to design, deploy, scale and operate OpenStack clouds without consulting or dedicated OpenStack headcount. The Autopilot dramatically reduces the cost of owning and operating an OpenStack deployment.

“Economics are the prime driver of cloud adoption; for public and also for private cloud” said Mark Shuttleworth. “The OpenStack Autopilot transforms the economics of private cloud, enabling every institution to create its own private cloud without hiring specialist OpenStack skills and without any third-party consulting.”

The OpenStack Autopilot is a new capability in Canonical’s Landscape management system, widely recognised as the most comprehensive enterprise linux management system available today, and which now gains the ability to deploy and operate OpenStack clouds.

“The Autopilot presents users with a range of software-defined storage and networking options, studies the available hardware allocated to the cloud, creates an optimised reference architecture for that cluster, and deploys the cloud from scratch” said Mark Baker, who leads cloud product management for Canonical. “Over time the Autopilot will manage the cloud, handling upgrades and dealing with operational issues as they occur.”

The Autopilot can add hardware to an existing cloud, making it easy to grow a private cloud as storage and compute needs evolve. “The biggest challenge for OpenStack operators is how to scale and upgrade their clouds dynamically, without having to re-architect entire swathes of infrastructure. The Autopilot provides a best practice cloud architecture and automates that entire process.”

Ubuntu is the most widely used cloud platform and also the most popular OpenStack distribution – 65% of large scale production OpenStack clouds are built on Ubuntu, according the latest Linux Foundation Survey. The OpenStack project has now matured, with many companies evaluating and selecting OpenStack for their private cloud deployments.

Containerised cloud services

Canonical’s leadership of the Linux Containers project, and the LXD pure-container hypervisor, enable the Autopilot to place individual OpenStack administrative services in dedicated containers for ease of administration and scale.

Choice of cloud technologies and vendors

The OpenStack Autopilot allows the operator to choose from a range of software-defined storage and networking options. Canonical operates the largest interoperability lab, called the OpenStack Interop Lab (OIL), with more than 30 vendors testing the interaction of their solutions and components in daily Ubuntu OpenStack deployments. OIL is the basis for validation and certification of vendor offerings for inclusion in the OpenStack Autopilot.

About Canonical

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu and the leading provider of enterprise services for Ubuntu OpenStack cloud deployments. Ubuntu delivers reliability, performance and interoperability to cloud and scale out environments. Telcos and cloud service providers trust Ubuntu for OpenStack and public cloud and it is used by global enterprises such as AT&T, Comcast, Cisco WebEx, Deutsche Telekom, Ericsson, China Telecom, Korea Telecom, NEC, NTT, Numergy and Time Warner Cable.

Canonical’s tools Juju and MAAS raise the bar for scale-out orchestration in hybrid cloud environments. With developers, support staff and engineering centres all over the world, Canonical is uniquely positioned to help its partners and enterprise customers make the most of Ubuntu. Canonical is a privately held company.

You can test drive OpenStack Autopilot downloading Canonical’s new vSphere compatible appliance.