Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2020

Embedded Linux for teams

A Linux kernel for each developer team, which uses it to bring up target boards. Bespoke, built, issued, and maintained over years by the vendor. Teams that focus on building great apps, rather than figuring out hardware dependencies. Happy developers that bootstrap smart devices in no time. This is what highly productive embedded systems development should look like. Let’s unpack that vision.

Canonical publishes LTS Docker Image Portfolio on Docker Hub

November 24th 2020: Canonical has published the LTS Docker Image Portfolio, a curated set of secure container application images, on Docker Hub. The LTS Docker Image Portfolio comes with up to ten years Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical. “LTS Images are built on trusted infrastructure, in a secure environment, with guarantees of stable security updates,” said Mark Lewis, VP Application Services at Canonical.

Exploring ROS 2 Kubernetes configurations

Kubernetes and robotics make a great match. However, as we have seen, robots running ROS 2 can be tricky to set up on Kubernetes. This blog series has explored running ROS 2 on Kubernetes, set up a simple talker and listener, and distributed that demo across three machines. The configurations presented may not quite fit your implementation, and you may want to dig a bit deeper into network traffic when troubleshooting.

Cybersecurity defenses for IIoT

Cybersecurity attacks on industrial IoT solutions can have detrimental consequences. This is the case because IoT devices record privacy-sensitive data and control production assets. Therefore, demonstrable trustworthiness is prerequisite to IoT adoption in industrial settings. Fortunately, IT security is a mature field. Experts have identified classes of threats devices may be subject to. Let’s discuss these threat patterns and mitigation strategies in the IIoT context.

Distribute ROS 2 across machines with MicroK8s

Our simple ROS 2 talker and listener setup runs well on a single Kubernetes node, now let’s distribute it out across multiple computers. This article builds upon our simple ROS 2 talker / listener setup by running it on multiple K8s nodes. At the completion of this setup expect to have a ROS2 Kubernetes cluster running MicroK8s on three different machines. Applying a single configuration file distributes the ROS 2 workload across the machines.

Edge computing is dead, long live micro clouds and IoT gateways

“The King is dead, long live the King.” It might be my french roots speaking, but it seems that actual use cases are replacing King Edge, and it might be for the best. Warning; do not read this blog if you’re particularly sensitive about edge computing (and if you don’t know what this is about, read the “What’s the deal with edge computing?” blog first).

10 years and 10 million cores: charting OpenStack's greatest achievements

Technology anniversaries have become more commonplace in recent years. The iPhone at 10 years old, indeed Canonical itself turned 15 last year. Here though, we want to look at OpenStack reaching double figures this year. Starting off as a joint project between NASA and Rackspace in 2010, over 500 companies have now joined the OpenStack project in the past decade, which has spun off dozens of sub-projects.

Canonical's Open Operator Collection extends Kubernetes operators to traditional Linux and Windows applications

13th November 2020: Canonical’s Open Operator Collection, the largest collection of application operators, now supports both cloud-native and traditional applications on Windows and Linux. The collection is hosted at Charmhub.io and follows the Open Operator Manifesto.

Software defined everything - M. Shuttleworth, Canonical at AfricaCom 2020

New digital infrastructure is software defined, across many layers from multiple vendors, from central data centers and public cloud right to the cabinet or customer premises. Wrangling software complexity is a primary challenge for communications companies globally.

How to get started with 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. You can also read more about Ubuntu Desktop on Raspberry Pi.

Edge-native Linux

Tech innovators use Linux to create intelligent devices for homes, factories, buildings, cities or vehicles etc… These things are deployed at the edge, in privacy sensitive or business critical environments. They require ever more compute to run ever smarter applications. A Linux distribution engineered for embedded devices running highly intelligent applications at edge scale is overdue. Let’s discuss what it takes to get there.

The State of Robotics - October 2020

This post marks the one year anniversary of the Ubuntu Robotics newsletter. We knew adding the year on the end of each title was a good idea! One full year where the Ubuntu Robotics team have been documenting their work, showcasing projects in ROS and discussing interesting things going on in the community. And my, what a year it has been. To mark the occasion, we’d love to hear and write about any work you’ve done in robotics or ROS over the last year.

Deploying Kubeflow everywhere: desktop, edge, and IoT devices

Kubeflow, the ML toolkit on K8s, now fits on your desktop and edge devices! 🚀 Kubeflow provides the cloud-native interface between Kubernetes and data science tools: libraries, frameworks, pipelines, and notebooks. > Read more about what is Kubeflow To make Kubeflow the standard cloud-native tool for MLOps within the AI landscape, the open-source community has accomplished the aggregation and integration of many projects on top of Kubernetes.

How Kubernetes is transforming the industrial edge

According to leading independent researchers teknowlogy | PAC, open source platforms – and Kubernetes in particular – are central to the future of digital factories. The PAC RADAR report offers a detailed market analysis of industrial digitalisation trends, and it predicts that Kubernetes-based platforms that bring together edge and cloud technologies will soon dominate the digital factory landscape.