Canonical has announced the general availability of MicroCloud, a low-touch, open source cloud solution. MicroCloud is part of Canonical’s growing cloud infrastructure portfolio. It is purpose-built for scalable clusters and edge deployments for all types of enterprises. It is designed with simplicity, security and automation in mind, minimising the time and effort to both deploy… Read more »
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Canonical has launched an OpenStack Autopilot system which it claims will make it so much easier to create and run clouds using open systems that it will ‘dramatically’ cut the cost of ownership. In a statement it promised that the need for staff and consultants will fall as a result of the pre-engineered simplicity built into it OpenStack based system.
The OpenStack Autopilot is a new feature in Canonical’s Landscape management system, a platform based on Linux. The Autopilot can add hardware to an existing cloud, making it easy to grow a private cloud as storage and compute needs change.
According to Canonical, currently the biggest challenge for OpenStack operators is finding a way to adapt their cloud to requirements dynamically, when the computing demands of customers are invariably both volatile and unpredictable. The cost of manually doing this, which involves re-designing entire swathes of infrastructure, is proving prohibitive to many clients, it said. The Autopilot provides a best-practice cloud architecture and automates that entire process, it claims.
Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, the most widely used cloud platform and the most popular OpenStack distribution. According the latest Linux Foundation survey 65% of large scale production OpenStack clouds are built on Ubuntu. The OpenStack Autopilot allows an operator to choose from a range of software-defined storage and networking options.
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 installs the cloud from scratch, according to Canonical.
The OpenStack Autopilot is so simple to use that any enterprise can create its own private cloud without hiring specialists, according to Mark Baker, Canonical’s cloud product management leader.
“Over time the Autopilot will manage the cloud, handling upgrades and dealing with operational issues as they occur,” said Baker.
Krishnan will lead Canonical’s cloud efforts
Canonical has appointed former Microsoft exec Anand Krishnan to the role of executive vice president for cloud, where he will lead most of the company’s cloud-related efforts globally including business-development, marketing, engineering and customer delivery activities.
Krishnan most recently served as UK General Manager for Microsoft’s Developer Platform division where he was responsible in part for scaling the Azure business, which by most measures seems to be growing at record pace. Before joining Microsoft in 2004 he spent about five years at Trilogy, a Texas-based software firm specialising in lead generation solutions for the automotive, insurance and telecoms sectors.
“Great businesses make an extraordinary difference to the customers they serve. Canonical has the products and the momentum to do exactly that,” Krishnan said.
“I couldn’t be more excited to be joining the team at this time and helping shape the next phase of our journey”
Canonical has in recent months moved to bolster its cloud strategy with BootSack, its managed private cloud offering, and its own distribution of OpenStack. Its Linux distro Ubuntu is the most popular OS in use on AWS EC2 (though other Linux incumbents have questioned those claims), and it also recently launched Ubuntu Core, a slimmed-down, re-architected version of the Ubuntu operating system that borrows from heavily from the Linux container (isolated frameworks) and mobile (transactional updates) worlds.
SolidFire, a provider of all-solid-state (SSD) storage systems for cloud service providers, announced today, in conjunction with Canonical, a production-ready reference architecture for deploying OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder). SolidFire will be demonstrating the deployment of 1,000 production- ready VMs with predictable performance and fine-grain quality of service (QoS) via Canonical, OpenStack Compute and Block Storage at the OpenStack Summit, taking place October 15 through October 18 in San Diego.
John Griffith from SolidFire and David Medberry from Canonical will co-present the summit’s first workshop: “How to Deploy a Best-of-Breed OpenStack Compute and Block Storage Cloud” on Monday, October 15, at 9:50 a.m. local time. The session will include information on deployment tools, tips and tricks, targeted use cases, benchmark results and key enabling technologies.
“SolidFire has done a great job leading the Block Storage project in line with the OpenStack philosophy of delivering a pluggable architecture with integration points for multiple vendors and technologies,” said Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation. “It’s exciting to see more production implementations and configuration options available to OpenStack users.”
“Canonical has worked with SolidFire to ensure tight integration of Cinder into Ubuntu OpenStack packages to deliver a production-ready cloud infrastructure. As the reference operating system for OpenStack, Ubuntu was the natural choice to integrate with SolidFire’s solution,” commented Nick Barcet, Ubuntu cloud product manager at Canonical. “We believe SolidFire’s work in OpenStack is extremely important to the ecosystem, because it allows cloud providers to enhance their offering with high IOPS storage and unprecedented quality-of-service. They have also been leading the Cinder project in OpenStack to deliver a great abstraction layer that can be reused by other vendors to integrate their own solution.”
“Cinder has gotten off to a very successful start thanks to the hard work of more than 50 individual contributors,” said John Griffith, senior software engineer at SolidFire. “We delivered a deep feature set in our first release of Cinder, which allowed us to move quickly with Canonical in executing this powerful production-ready reference architecture for large-scale multi-tenant clouds.”
Key SolidFire-related features in the first OpenStack Cinder release include:
SolidFire’s efforts around OpenStack are further evidence of its commitment to delivering proven, integrated storage solutions for its customers’ cloud infrastructures. This Cinder integration milestone follows SolidFire’s recently announced integration with major technology vendors across the cloud ecosystem.
Learn more: www.solidfire.com | www.twitter.com/solidfireinc | www.facebook.com/solidfire.
