Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

April 2020

Go for ROS

If you started reading this post thinking I would explain why you should go for ROS when building robots, think again. To be fair, that topic deserves a post of its own. But for this article, I’ll be using Go in the context of Golang. As in the Go programming language. As in the one designed by Google with an adorable Gopher for a mascot. Specifically, we will talk about ROS client libraries for the Go programming language; their features, their advantages, and what gaps still remain.

WSLConf: Sessions Part 2 - DevOps on WSL and more

This is the second blog in our series releasing the WSLConf recordings. Earlier this year, Canonical had the pleasure of hosting WSLConf, a virtual conference dedicated to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The conference highlighted ideas and projects from presenters from around the globe with attendees from at least eight different time zones.

Work smart, not hard - fun applications to help you do less in your day

Modern-day life is fast, hectic, demanding. Time is precious, and we often need to be able to squeeze every atom of efficiency from our environment and our tools. But sometimes, the best thing you can do for your productivity is – to do nothing. Sometimes, less is more. In this article, we want to show you a number of nice, fun and not-strictly-productivity-focused apps that can help you relax, forget about the time-efficiency continuum, and recharge your cells for the next lap in the race.

Unleash your IoT Development tools with WSL

Francesco Buccoli, Microsoft Marco Dal Pino, SoftJam See how easily a set of Linux tools for IoT could be perfectly integrated in a development pipeline, as part of an industrial process that makes devices ready to be used. To achieve this, we'll leverage on some containerized solution hosted on Azure along with standard IoT industry tools, all driven by Visual Studio Code and GitHub.

Ubuntu kernel 5.4: What's new with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS has just arrived. The latest LTS comes with a new version of the Linux kernel – 5.4 – which brings a lot of exciting new features, faster boot times, enhanced performance and security. Additionally, the Canonical kernel team ran benchmark tests to validate the performance improvements of the new kernel. Defining which Linux kernel should be included in a long-term support release of Ubuntu is the essence of the work of the kernel team at Canonical.

Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS: stability, security and more

Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (long-term support) is here with enterprise-class stability, resiliency and even better security. As an LTS release, it will be supported by Canonical until 2025. However, customers can extend the support by an additional five years through the ESM (Extended Security Maintenance) service as part of their UA-I (Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure) subscription.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS arrives

April 23rd 2020: Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announced the general availability of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, with a particular emphasis on security and performance. “Accelerating open source globally is our mission. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is the new state of the art open source platform for the enterprise and the entrepreneur,” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical.

2004 to 20.04 LTS: 16 years of Ubuntu mascots

Creating a new release of Ubuntu is always a complex undertaking. At Canonical, delivering Ubuntu is our core mission, and each new version represents the culmination of months of effort from colleagues throughout our organisation – not to mention the contributions from our wider, open source community. And as our Bionic Beavers and Trusty Tahrs race towards their release dates, one of the final steps is to bring them to life with a mascot.

Installing NVIDIA GPU Drivers On Oracle Cloud

In recent reports, it is stated that datacenter-based GPU deployments is the fastest sector, and again, that’s no surprise. The cloud has had its own incredible growth over the years, and it’s only natural that these two technologies are starting to work in harmony. As a matter of fact, most public clouds have GPU offerings, which leads us to the meat of this blog post: Oracle Cloud.

Ubuntu 20.04 survey results

In December 2019, we asked you what you thought were the most important things for us to include in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. 21,862 people took the survey, and have since become a part of our decision-making processes. We would like to thank each and everyone who spent their time to take this survey, upon its close, the results were taken to the relevant engineering teams to support, or discourage, 20.04 decisions. Going forward, the results will remain a source of information for what the community wants.

Sharing and growing your OSS Project with Live Streaming

Your OSS project is looking better day by day. You've selected your preferred platform, frameworks, programming language and maybe a contributor or two. All is well except you aren't seeing the growth of your project as you'd like. Few stars and forks, and no open issues. What to do? This is where you can take advantage of live streaming communities to expand your OSS project's reach, code live as chatters ask questions and reuse the content for blog posts, YouTube and social media. By the end of this session, you'll have the tools and knowledge to successfully start live streaming.

2004 to 20.04 LTS: Ubuntu in popular culture

When we launched Ubuntu back in 2004, our mission to make well-supported, free open source software available to everyone, everywhere was a bold one – but today, Ubuntu is one of the world’s most popular operating systems. One consequence of that popularity is that Ubuntu has very much entered the public consciousness, and its influence can be seen across all kinds of popular culture.

WSLConf: Sessions Part 1 - C++ cross-platform development and more

Earlier this year, Canonical had the pleasure of hosting WSLConf, a virtual conference dedicated to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). We demonstrated what teamwork and community can achieve when we flipped the in-person conference to a virtual experience in less than a week. WSLConf united developers, security professionals, team leaders from Microsoft, and a passionate community from all around the world.

What is an Ubuntu LTS release?

Come April 23rd 2020, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be available. It will be the first LTS version of Ubuntu since the 18.04 release, and in this blog, I want to answer the common question, what is an LTS? For a deeper look at the benefits of using an Ubuntu LTS, there’s a whitepaper for that, for anything else, this post will answer your questions.

LXD pod commissioning data

MAAS is built to manage machines, including the operating systems on those machines. Enlistment and commissioning are features that make it easier to start managing a machine – as long as that machine has been configured to netboot. Enlistment enables users to simply connect a machine, configure the firmware properly, and power it on so that MAAS can find it and add it.

IBM Z delivers a Trusted Execution Environment with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and new single frame models

In September 2019, IBM released z15 and LinuxONE III, the most secure cloud environment in the market featuring pervasive encryption built-in at its core with Ubuntu. This offered a solid foundation to launch hardened security offerings for the mainframe across platforms such as MongoDB, Postgres, IDAA, IBM Cloud Private and the IBM Hyper Protect services family.

Robotics pages on Ubuntu: bridging the gap

Today, 10/04/2020, new robotics pages went live on ubuntu.com. We want to show our involvement, our stance and our support for ROS and robotics. These three pages cover what we do in the robotics space, Canonical’s involvement with ROS and Open Robotics, and the relevance of community in the field of robotics. Our intention is to be another entry point for new users to involve themselves and to enable them to build robots with ROs on Ubuntu.

An adventure through the Snap Store

An application store with a large number of entries is a double-edged sword. It’s often a good sign of a vibrant, thriving community of software creators, developers and users working together. But then, people new to the ecosystem may struggle finding relevant content right away. The Snap Store currently offers about 7,000 applications, so exploration and discovery can take quite a bit of time and effort.

CIS hardened Ubuntu: cyber attack and malware prevention for mission-critical systems

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a nonprofit organisation that uses a community-driven process to release benchmarks to safeguard enterprises against cyber attacks. It is one of the most recognised industry standards that provides comprehensive configuration checklists to identify and remediate security vulnerabilities in a computing environment.

Simplify NFV adoption - Charmed OSM and Managed Apps

Charmed OSM and Managed Apps let telecom operators accelerate adoption of NFV. This is needed because the way we consume data has changed. We want data at a cheaper price with faster speeds and in larger quantities. To meet the challenge, telecom operators are changing the underlying network infrastructure that delivers data. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) are enabling this by lowering costs and improving infrastructure flexibility.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute turns to Canonical for high level Ceph support

The Wellcome Sanger Institute, a global centre of excellence for genomic research, leads the scientific advancement of areas such as cancer, infectious diseases and cellular genetics. With a need to collaborate and share data with other centres around the world, The Institute has to store, process and share vast amounts of data.

The Wellcome Sanger Institute: sharing genomic research worldwide securely with supported Ceph

A world-leading genomic research centre, the Wellcome Sanger Institute uses advanced DNA sequencing technology for large-scale studies that surpass the capabilities of many other organisations. Among other works, the Institute is currently heading the UK-wide Darwin Tree of Life Project to map the genetic code of 60,000 complex species.

The State of Robotics - March 2020

Damn it March. 2020 was doing so well. The biggest news last month was the dramatic escalation of COVID-19. We won’t go into any detail, I’m sure you’re seeing enough of that. But due to the outbreak, the state of robotics this March has been, heartwarming. We have seen a surge in online learning platforms, companies, startups and communities rising to the challenge.

LXD 4.0 LTS stable release is now available

The stable release of LXD, the machine container hypervisor, is now available. LXD 4.0 is the third LTS release for LXD and will be supported for 5 years, until June 2025. This version comes with a significant amount of new features including adding virtual machines (VMs) support, the introduction of projects and improved networking, storage and security capabilities.

Edge AI in a 5G world - part 4: How your business can benefit from 'smart cell towers'

In part 1 we talked about the industrial applications and benefits that 5G and fast compute at the edge will bring to AI products. In part 2 we went deeper into how you can benefit from this new opportunity. In part 3 we focused on the key technical barriers that 5G and Edge compute remove for AI applications. In this part we will summarise the IoT use cases that can benefit from smart cell towers and how they will help businesses focus their efforts on their key differentiating advantage.

Edge AI in a 5G world - part 3: Why 'smart cell towers' matter to AI

In part 1 we talked about the industrial applications and benefits that 5G and fast compute at the edge will bring to AI products. In part 2 we went deeper into how you can benefit from this new opportunity. In this part we will focus on the key technical barriers that 5G and Edge compute remove for AI applications.

OpenStack distributions: How to choose the right one?

Choosing the right OpenStack distribution is essential to the success of an OpenStack project at every organisation. When selecting one, organisations should always follow certain criteria. Is it possible to operate the considered OpenStack distributions economically? How easy is it to deploy them? Can the organisation upgrade its production OpenStack cloud without affecting the workloads? Everyone planning to deploy OpenStack should ask themselves these questions.

FIPS 140-2: Stay compliant and secure with Canonical

FIPS 140-2 is a set of publicly announced cryptographic standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It is an essential part of FEDRamp requirements for many governmental agencies in the US and Canada, as well as their business partners from all around the world. Furthermore, as a well established and verified security standard, an increasing number of large companies and financial institutions are asking for FIPS compliance.

Steps to maximise robotics security with Ubuntu

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a popular open-source platform for advanced robotics. Its flexibility and ease-of-use make it well-suited to a wide array of robotics applications – however, these robots are not always sufficiently protected against security threats. Opportunistic attacks are by far the most prevalent, and robots with inadequate ROS security make tempting targets for bad actors.

The DevOps guide to IoT projects

Traditional development methods do not scale into the IoT sphere. Strong inter-dependencies and blurred boundaries among components in the edge device stack result in fragmentation, slow updates, security issues, increased cost, and reduced reliability of platforms. This reality places a major strain on IoT players who need to contend with varying cycles and priorities in the development stack, limiting their flexibility to innovate and introduce changes into their products, both on the hardware and software sides.

Getting started with AI

From the smallest startups to the largest enterprises alike, organisations are using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to make the best, fastest, most informed decisions to overcome their biggest business challenges. But with AI/ML complexity spanning infrastructure, operations, resources, modelling and compliance and security, while constantly innovating, many organizations are left unsure how to capture their data and get started on delivering AI technologies and methodologies.