Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

September 2023

Digital innovation in finance - the open source imperative

Digital innovation is transforming finance. Advances in financial technology such as mobile money, peer-to-peer (P2P) or marketplace lending, robo advice, and insurance technology (InsurTech) are reshaping many areas – from payments to wealth management. Over the past decade, fintechs have already driven enhanced access to financial services for retail users. Technology advances in connectivity, data processing, and storage have contributed to the current wave of technology-based finance.

Still running Ubuntu 18.04? What you need to know

Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, installed by millions of users and continuing to have a massive footprint on AWS, hit its End of Life (EOL) in May 2023. When using an unsupported version of Ubuntu LTS, your system and your end users are vulnerable to security risks. Not every company has the time or resources to undertake a migration project to a later and supported Ubuntu LTS distribution which is why many are adopting Ubuntu Pro.

Install MLflow in less than 5 minutes

Install MLflow quickly on Ubuntu using our distribution, Charmed MLFlow. You can integrate it with different tools, so you can run it on your workstation with Jupyter Notebook or at scale with Charmed Kubeflow. Charmed MLFlow is a fully open source distribution of the upstream project, that benefits from security patching, tool integration and automated lifecycle management.

Charmed Kubeflow 1.8 Beta Release

The AI/ML team at Canonical is happy to announce the release of Charmed Kubeflow 1.8 Beta and invites you to share your feedback. If you want to learn about the updates in this upcoming release first, be sure to join our livestream on 5 October. Canonical’s Kubeflow team will discuss what Charmed Kubeflow 1.8 brings to the table and dig into the details. Some of the updates that we will cover during the livestream include.

Canonical releases Charmed MLFlow

London, United Kingdom, 26 September 2023. Canonical announced today that Charmed MLFlow, Canonical’s distribution of the popular machine learning platform, is now generally available. Charmed MLFlow is part of Canonical’s growing MLOps portfolio. Ideal for model registry and experiment tracking, Charmed MLFlow is integrated with other AI and big data tools such as Apache Spark and Kubeflow. The solution runs on any infrastructure, from workstations to public and private clouds.

Build a CIS hardened Ubuntu Pro server image on the AWS Console

Learn how to elevate the security of your Ubuntu servers by creating a CIS-hardened Ubuntu Pro AMI using only the AWS web console. Join Canonical Public Cloud Alliance Director Carlos Bravo in this step-by-step tutorial as he walks through the hardening process utilizing the Ubuntu Security Guide (USG) tool to ensure your system's security aligns with industry standards including CIS and DISA-STIG.

Securing Open Source Dependencies on Public Cloud

Aaron Whitehouse, Senior Director of Public Cloud Enablement at Canonical, explains why you need to be thinking about open source dependencies in your software pipelines. He covers three main areas of software dependency management: ESM is part of Canonical's Ubuntu Pro offering and gives developers access to approximately 30,000 packages that they can build on, confident in the knowledge that Canonical will patch high and critical vulnerabilities for up to 10 years while preserving API stability -- regardless of the upstream project's support lifecycle.

Fast SDV prototyping in automotive with real-time kernel

Automotive software developers often face challenges when they want to try out their software on target hardware. Which can cause issues since multiple teams have to share limited hardware resources and prototype benches. With the microchip shortage, it’s become even more difficult to get hardware benches for testing and debugging software.

Deploy fully configured VMs in minutes on Google Cloud, using gcloud CLI and cloud-init

Every public cloud provider has a templating mechanism to deploy fully configured applications. For anyone interested in a vendor-neutral approach that works on major public clouds, cloud-init offers a good solution. Cloud-init makes your work re-usable regardless of the clouds you deploy to. It’s an open source configuration automation solution for Linux, which performs steps at various stages of a single machine’s boot up.

Ubuntu updates, releases and repositories explained

Since we launched Ubuntu Pro’s Expanded Security Maintenance for additional packages, and we now integrate more closely with public cloud update management tools, more people have been asking us about the Ubuntu archive and how this is divided and security patched. In this blog we will therefore explain Ubuntu releases, how the Ubuntu archive is divided into different sections and how we deliver Ubuntu updates.

Real-time Ubuntu is now available in AWS Marketplace

Austin, TX, 12 September 2023: Canonical is thrilled to announce the listing of Ubuntu Pro 22.04 LTS with real-time kernel in AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog with thousands of software listings from independent software vendors that make it easy to find, test, buy, and deploy software that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

How telcos are building carrier-grade infrastructure using open source

Service providers need cloud infrastructure everywhere, from modern 5G and 6G network functions running in the network core to sophisticated AI/ML jobs running on the edge. Given the sensitivity of those workloads to any interruptions, outages or performance degradations, the cloud infrastructure used by telecommunication companies needs to be fast, robust and ultra stable.

TPM-backed Full Disk Encryption is coming to Ubuntu

Full disk encryption, FDE, has long been an integral part of Ubuntu’s security strategy. Its mission is straightforward: to mitigate the risks of data breaches due to device loss and unauthorised access, by encrypting data while stored on the computer’s hard drive or storage device. For 15 years, Ubuntu’s approach to full disk encryption relied on passphrases for authenticating users.

Into the Labyrinth: Revealing the Mantic Minotaur

Few creatures from mythology have captured the imagination of mankind quite like the legendary Minotaur. A half-man, half-bull behemoth that is said to guard the halls of the impenetrable labyrinth of Crete. The ancient sagas stated that only the bravest of warriors would be able to match its incredible strength and escape its mystifying maze.

Cloud storage for enterprises

Any data-centric organisation faces the prospect of data growth at some point in their existence; it is estimated that more than 2,500 Petabytes (PB) of new data is created every day. While only a few organisations will ever have to deal with that kind of scale, it is important to plan ahead for your own organisation’s growth. Legacy appliance-based storage systems where hardware and software are closely coupled can be expensive to maintain, expand, and difficult to operate.

Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur Mascot Animation

Just as the prophecy foretold, the Ubuntu 23.10 Mantic Minotaur has been revealed! Few creatures from mythology have captured the imagination of mankind quite like the legendary Minotaur. The word Mantic is used to describe one’s ability to prophesy or reach into the future. Our lead designer, Marcus Haslam, pulled inspiration from the ancient past when creating our iconic Minotaur Mascot and new official wallpapers.

Introduction to MLFlow

MLFlow is an open source platform used for managing machine learning workflows. It is a crucial component of the open source MLOps ecosystem, having passed 10 million monthly downloads at the end of 2022. It has four main components that ensure experiment tracking, model registry, model deployment and code packaging. Join our webinar to learn more about MLFlow During this webinar, Andreea Munteanu will discuss MLFlow and Charmed MLFlow, Canonical’s distribution of the open source platform.

Empowering government innovation: a secure path to open source excellence

The Australian Federal Government is not alone in dealing with challenges like natural disasters, global pandemics and economic uncertainty. Like many governments, they are looking for new and innovative ways to tackle these challenges. FST Government 2023 is an exciting conference that brings over 200 government leaders together to explore how the latest advances in digital technology can help support better policy outcomes and citizen service delivery.