Canonical consolidates open infrastructure support and security offerings

29th April, 2019: Canonical today announced Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, a consolidated enterprise security, compliance and support offering that covers the full range of open source infrastructure capabilities for up to 10 years.

“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, CEO at Canonical.

The new approach continues Canonical’s tradition of driving down costs and sets a new bar for efficiency in large-scale Linux enterprise operations. 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.

Long-term security updates and maintenance

For customers who do not need technical support, the Essential level of UA 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.

UA Infrastructure Essential covers regulatory compliance for Linux and infrastructure components including base Docker images, without adding the cost of support.

Technical support, legal assurance and break-fix engineering

The Standard and Advanced levels of UA Infrastructure include technical support for open infrastructure, the development of long-term fixes to specific defects, and legal assurance.

“We are moving our business towards a multi-cloud strategy built on open-source technology to enhance our time to market, flexibility and benefit from better economics. Partnering with Canonical to shape this direction has enabled us to move quicker than anticipated and realise the benefits of open source in an agile manner with the reassurance of ongoing enterprise support,” said Luis Castro Sequeira, Head of Infrastructure Architecture at Copa Airlines.

Fully managed infrastructure

Embracing public cloud has taught companies the value of focus on their applications rather than their infrastructure, 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.

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About Canonical

Canonical is the publisher of Ubuntu, the OS for most public cloud workloads as well as the emerging categories of smart gateways, self-driving cars and advanced robots. Canonical provides enterprise security, support and services to commercial users of Ubuntu. Established in 2004, Canonical is a privately held company.