Canonical has fired a shot across Red Hat’s bows with the launch of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure – a newly bundled security and support offering for the Linux-based operating system – which touts the virtues of aggregating Ubuntu, Kubernetes, OpenStack, Ceph and SWIFT updates into one package, for no extra cost.
The new approach sets a “new bar for efficiency” in large-scale Linux enterprise operations, privately held Canonical said, adding that it “stands in direct contrast to the complexity and cost of offerings from Red Hat and VMware which require additional licenses per host or per VM for capabilities like OpenStack and Kubernetes.”
“Aggregating Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, KVM, Ceph and SWIFT security update and support offerings into a single package enables businesses to evolve from traditional infrastructure to private cloud and container operations without introducing any new cost,” said Stephan Fabel, Director of Product at Canonical in a release.
(Firing shots at rival Red Hat is not an unusual pastime for Canonical; CEO Mark Shuttleworth pointing in a blog post after IBM’s Red Hat acquisition to “the decline in RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] growth contrasted with the acceleration in Linux more broadly”, twisting the knife with the claim that “public cloud workloads have largely avoided RHEL. Container workloads even more so…”)
Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure: What’s Included?
The offering includes a long-term stream of security updates, including regulatory compliance for Linux and infrastructure components and comes in three separately priced packages: Essential, Standard and Advanced.
Pricing starts at $25 per desktop for “essential” with virtual servers $75 each and physical servers $225.
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For customers who do not need technical support, the Essential level of Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure provides a stream of kernel live patches and security fixes for system services and libraries including OpenStack and Kubernetes, Ceph and SWIFT, together with FIPS and a range of infrastructure management and operations capabilities such as Prometheus, Grafana, Telegraf, Graylog, Filebeat, Elastic Search, MAAS and Canonical’s Landscape systems management offering.
All three tiers include Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and a kernel live patch service that includes access to and support for livepatches on all systems covered by Livepatch; Canonical’s live updates service, which is used by customers ranging from Bloomberg to Cisco.
Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure: Pricing
“A surge of customers adding Ubuntu to their list of officially supported operating systems has given us the volume to simplify our infrastructure security and support offering, and lower the average cost per machine even further,” said Mark Shuttleworth.
Embracing public cloud has taught companies the value of focus on their applications rather than their infrastructure, the company said, and has increased demand for fully managed private cloud. Canonical offers fully managed OpenStack, fully managed Kubernetes on bare metal, OpenStack, VMware and public clouds, and fully managed storage infrastructure.
