Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

October 2020

Introducing etrace - a multi-purpose application profiling tool

These days, the internal workings of Linux applications involve many different moving parts. Sometimes, it can be rather difficult to debug them when things go wrong or run slower than expected. Tracing an application’s execution is one way of understanding potential issues without diving into the source code. To this end, we wrote an app-tracing tool called etrace, designed to detect performance bottlenecks and runtime issues in snaps.

New installation options coming for Ubuntu on WSL

The experience of installing Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) just keeps getting better. Beginning in Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 20246, released today by Microsoft, users can enable a complete WSL experience. This will enable WSL 2, download and install the latest WSL 2 Linux kernel, and then download and install the most recent Ubuntu LTS on WSL.

Kubeflow operators: lifecycle management for the ML stack

Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, releases Charmed Kubeflow, a set of charm operators to deliver the 20+ applications that make up the latest version of Kubeflow, for easy consumption anywhere, from workstations to on-prem, public cloud, and edge. > Visit Charmed-kubeflow.io to learn more. Kubeflow provides the cloud-native interface between Kubernetes, the industry standard for software delivery and operations at scale, and data science tools: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, and notebooks.

Ubuntu Desktop on Raspberry Pi

Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 sees much-anticipated support for the Raspberry Pi 🍓 Download an optimised image that transforms a Raspberry Pi 4 (with 4GB or 8GB of RAM) into a complete Ubuntu workstation. This wouldn’t have been possible without the Ubuntu community, the Raspberry Pi Foundations support and their incredible hardware, and you, the users. Finally, show us that you’re using the Ubuntu Desktop on your Raspberry Pi, or what you’re using it for for a chance to win some free Groovy Gorilla 🦍goodies.

Build a Raspberry Pi Desktop with an Ubuntu heart

On the 22nd October 2020, Canonical released an Ubuntu Desktop image optimised for the Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s 4GB and 8GB boards work out of the box with everything users expect from an Ubuntu Desktop. It is our honour to contribute an optimised Ubuntu Desktop image to the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s mission to put the power of computing into people’s hands all over the world.

OpenStack at 10 - from peak to plateau of productivity

This week is the latest Open Infrastructure Summit, in a week where the OpenStack Foundation became the Open Infrastructure Foundation to reflect the expansion of the organisation’s mission, scope and community to advance open source over the next decade to support open infrastructure. It is also ten years since OpenStack launched and a lot has changed during that time.

Telco cloud: what is that?

Telco cloud or a network function virtualisation infrastructure (NFVI) is a cloud environment optimised for telco workloads. It is usually based on well-known technologies like OpenStack. Thus, in many ways, it resembles ordinary clouds. On the other hand, however, it differs from them. This is because telco workloads have very specific requirements. Those include performance acceleration, high level of security and orchestration capabilities.

Introducing HA MicroK8s, the ultra-reliable, minimal Kubernetes

15th October 2020: Canonical today announced autonomous high availability (HA) clustering in MicroK8s, the lightweight Kubernetes. Already popular for IoT and developer workstations, MicroK8s now gains resilience for production workloads in cloud and server deployments. High availability is enabled automatically once three or more nodes are clustered, and the data store migrates automatically between nodes to maintain quorum in the event of a failure.

Building competitive advantage by adopting cloud-native approach

With the economies of many countries heading towards recession, increasing regulations, growing security threats and increasing costs, financial services firms need practical solutions, now more than ever. Many of the financial technology firms (‘fintechs’) and mobile app-based challenger banks have taken advantage of modern application architectures and DevOps practices that are associated with cloud native technologies.

Configure and apply hardening rules in minutes with Ubuntu CIS Benchmark tooling

CIS benchmark has hundreds of configuration recommendations, so hardening a system manually can be very tedious. To drastically improve this process for enterprises, Canonical has made CIS automation tooling available to its Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure customers and Ubuntu Pro users on the public cloud (Azure, AWS).

Canonical expands collaboration with NVIDIA to bring AI to the edge

Canonical has been working closely with NVIDIA for many years to fuel innovation and support open source software with the power of accelerated processing. That already allowed us to jointly deliver GPU acceleration into Linux, OpenStack and container workloads on traditional datacenter servers. We continued working together, with Ubuntu forming the base operating system for NVIDIA DGX systems, including the latest NVIDIA DGX A100 system.

How to make snaps and configuration management tools work together

In environments with large numbers of client machines, configuration management tools are often used to simplify and standardize the target state of each host in a seamless, automated and consistent manner. Software like CFEngine, Chef, Ansible, and others offer a high degree of granular control over software packaging and system configurations.