Canonical has announced that the next version of Ubuntu for server and cloud environments will be released on 17 October 2013.
"Ubuntu 13.10 delivers the latest and best version of OpenStack, and is the fastest, most flexible platform for scale-out computing," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and VP products for Canonical.
"Ubuntu is typically used in very large scale deployments. In this release we’ve tuned the cloud deployment experience for very small clusters as well, to support dev-and-test environments."
This 13.10 release makes it possible to deploy a full OpenStack cloud on only 5 servers and offers a sophisticated Landscape dashboard for the management of Ubuntu OpenStack clouds no matter their size.
Enterprise management of OpenStack clouds and the workloads deployed on them has been a focus for Canonical in the latest development cycle.
Federico Lucifredi, who leads Ubuntu server product management, said: "With Landscape, we simplify the lives of enterprise compliance and administration teams, with a full suite of compliance, performance monitoring and security update tools that work on all cloud and physical environments. Now we’ve added time dashboards for your OpenStack cloud, too."
While Ubuntu itself is an operating system, much of the recent work by Canonical and the Ubuntu community has been to deliver complete solutions and applications on top of it. The breakthrough Juju service orchestration tool from Canonical makes it easy to design, deploy, manage and scale workloads securely from a browser or the command line.
In 13.10, Juju can instantly deploy an entire software environment or service as a "bundle" directly from the easy-to-use Juju GUI, improving on the previous deployment of individual components. This reduces complexity and enables administrators to share entire complex workloads consisting of many related parts.
13.10 introduces Juju management of LXC containers, which allow multiple services to run on the same physical or virtual machine. This gives system admins the option of greater density, reducing the total number of machines required to run a service, and reducing cost.
A new installer enables very rapid provisioning of thousands of nodes, typically five times faster than the best traditional Linux installation process. Ubuntu is uniquely suited to rapid provisioning and re-provisioning in large-scale data centres. The Ubuntu LXC update in 13.10 provides blindingly fast (less than one second) and efficient cloning of containers for faster scaling of containerized services, unique to Ubuntu.
