Canonical has released Ubuntu 19.04, the latest iteration of the open source Linux distribution, with a range of infrastructure-focussed upgrades including improved life-cycle management for multicloud and on-prem operations; from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.

Ubuntu 19.04 (dubbed “Disco Dingo”) also uses Linux Kernel 5.0 so users can expect better hardware support and performance improvement. It also supports the latest Kubernetes release for containers orchestration.

(Notably, Canonical as of late March also offers full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.14 using kubeadm deployments, its Charmed Kubernetes, and MicroK8s, its popular single-node deployment of Kubernetes.)

Snap Store Booming

Canonical said more than 2,000 independent software publishers now distribute their applications to Linux desktops, appliances and cloud VMs through the snap store; its app store for Linux applications, which now supports 41 Linux distributions.

That’s a impressive rise of 30 percent since October 2018.

Read this: Use of Enterprise Open Source Software is Surging

The company attributed the surge to growing contributions to the store by big software vendors like Microsoft that have drawn in new publishers in turn, as they sense industry momentum.

“The open-source-first on Ubuntu movement in telco, finance, and media has spread to other sectors. From the public cloud to the private data center to the edge appliance or cluster, open source has become the reference for efficiency and innovation. Ubuntu 19.04 includes the leading projects to underpin that transition, and the developer tooling to accelerate the applications for those domains” said Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s CEO.

New Developer Tools, VMware Management

Microsoft Visual Studio Code joined the list of developer tools published as snaps including IntelliJ, pyCharm, Postman and microK8s, Canonical noted, added that new to Ubuntu 19.04 is the ability to install multiple instances of the same snap for CI/CD, testing or phased rollouts.

For example, two versions of a database or two versions of the golang compiler can be installed at the same time. Snap epochs control when and how data migration happens between major version upgrades.

Other additions include automatic installation of VMware open-vm-tools for bi-directional clipboard, easy sharing of files and smooth power state management.

Ubuntu 19.04 is available for download here.

Read this: New CI/CD Foundation Draws Tech’s Big Beasts, Open Source Donations